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AND OTHER STORIES 



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They talked of many things — he and the governor-general. 

[Page 34.] 



'^JOHN O’MAY 

AND OTHER STORIES 


BY 

MAXWELL STRUTHERS BURT 


ILLUSTRATED 


CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
NEW YORK 1918 





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COPYWCSHT, 1916, 1916, 1917, 1918, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


Published September, 1918 





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CONTENTS 

PAGE 

John O’May i 

Wings of the Morning 37 

A Cup of Tea 75 

Closed Doors 117 

The Water-Hole 149 

Le Panache 183 

The Glory of the Wild Green Earth . . 217 




















ILLUSTRATIONS 


They talked of many things — he and the governor- 

general . Frontispiece 

FACING PAGB 

“On the ball, Dublin!” he said, and fell back ... 34 

1 

With her arms she made a gesture as if welcoming to 

them something from the air above 70 

“‘You’re English!’ I gasped out; and the buck said 
very sweetly; ‘That’s none of your damned busi- 
ness’” 86 

“And then, suddenly, I saw something that left me 

wondering — I saw Murray’s face” 136 

“I’d have to get up and leave the fire and go out into 

the night” 172 

“I kept saying, very steady and quiet: ‘Don’t shoot, 

Whitney! Don’t shoot or I’ll kill you !’” . . 180 

Craig examined him briskly. “He’s all right,” he said 194 


.7 • , ■ 


1 


/ 


> 






JOHN O’MAY 
















JOHN O’MAY 


OVENTURE, mental or physical, is met 



-ZjL with unexpectedly. There was a dinner at 
Tommy Dunstan’s and I had driven five miles 
across country. I was late, and I came in out of 
the semi-darkness of an April night — a little cres- 
cent moon cutting a thin band of white in a pale- 
green sky — to find the others already at table. 
They were mostly people I knew, neighbors of 
Tommy and myself: nice people; fox-hunters, 
most of them; solid young people with money 
back of them; tall, slim, delightfully healthy; the 
women with the iridescent, small-headed, not 
very mellow loveliness of American women — 
lilies without perfume. Then I noticed O’May. 

He struck me at once as alien and arresting. 
There was exotic coloring: a brown of sunburn, a 
vivid black of hair, a heather-gray of eyes. De- 
spite the half of him hidden by the table-cloth, 
one received an impression of slim-waistedness, 
of broad but distinctly well-bred shoulders, of 
clothes worn with the careless assurance of per- 
fection that seems to be one ^f the few traits ac- 
tually inherited. And there was as well, from 


3 


John O’May 

the way in which he bent toward the woman to 
whom he was talking, that curious suggestion of 
masculinity more common in Europeans than in 
Americans; a suggestion of — how shall I put it ? 
— of humorous acquiescence in a tradition ob- 
served but seen through completely. ... I won- 
dered who the man was. My neighbors wondered 
too. 

When dinner was over Dunstan called out to 
me. ‘‘Billy,” he said, “come here. I want you 
to meet Captain O’May. Captain John O’May.” 
Captain John O’May ! A name like an Irish day 
in April, isn’t it? “Ex-Tenth Hussars” — Dun- 
stan has the explanatory manner — “ex-Boer War, 
ex-coca-planter, ex-every thing, aren’t you. Jack ?” 

“ Ex-every thing,” returned the gentleman in 
question, with just the faintest hint of a brogue, 
“ex-everything, except exacting.” Then he 
laughed, showing very white, even teeth under a 
short mustache, and put out his hand. 

I felt immediately the tang to him. 

Captain O’May sat down; he poured himself a 
liqueur; he pushed the bottle toward me; I found 
myself listening with a bewildering suddenness to 
a preposterous story of baboons. I have no idea 
how baboons came to be mentioned; I don’t be- 
lieve they were mentioned; but I was swept up in 
4 


John O'May 

the tale. It seems in South Africa they march in 
regiments, the males first, the females with their 
babies following. In front goes a gray-bearded 
creature, portentous and not to be laughed at. 
When they come to a river the leaders plunge in 
and, taking hands, form a line over which the 
wives and children go. There is much screaming 
and refusal. The pantaloon general cuffs the ob- 
streperous. It is a curious sight in the great 
moonlight — the hairy shapes, the precision and 
gravity of it. All the while they swing their 
arms and make a hoarse marching chorus — 
“Rum-pah! Rum-pah !’’ Something like that. 
... I didn’t know whether to believe what I 
was hearing or not; but I had a distinct vision — 
of sands and a river like slow quicksilver, of a 
night wide as unknown seas, and of outlandish 
processions. My mind was entirely removed 
from an American suburb to countries lying on 
the outer edge of a planet which, if only you 
could see it in perspective, would seem a witch- 
like globe phosphorescent with romance. . . . 
After that I saw O’May no more for a month. 

When I did see him again it was again at Dun- 
stan’s, and instantly I felt the little thrill you 
feel when subconsciously you have been desiring 
the renewal of an acquaintanceship. I asked 
S 


John O’May 

him over to my place for the night. He came 
and spent six days — borrowing my collars and 
shirts with a calmness that gave to that irritating 
act a perpetual dignity. A dinner-jacket of mine 
fitted him perfectly. I imagine that every one’s 
clothes fitted O’May. 

And so, in the curiously casual manner he 
had, he fell into the habit of Dunstan and 
myself. 

All that summer and autumn and winter he 
would appear without warning, stay a week or 
two, and disappear as quietly as he had come. I 
liked him about; I liked his feline walk; I liked 
his attitude of quiescent readiness. He was so 
immediately willing to do anything, but at the 
same time so little weary of doing nothing at : II. 
One seldom meets a man who combines stoicism 
with eagerness. O’May lay in wait for life. I 
spoke of him to my friends as “a silent Irish- 
man”; I was not a little proud that I had dis- 
covered him. I had forgotten the baboon story, 
you see, or, if I thought of it at all, put it down 
to the conversational eagerness that follows an 
introduction. After three months I found, quite 
unexpectedly, that baboons, allegorically speak- 
ing, were poignantly characteristic of O’May. 

He sucked his pipe; he looked at the fire, and 
6 


f 


John O’May 

then at the clock which had just struck ten; he 
sipped his whiskey and burst into a passion of 
epic narration. I was utterly unprepared. Be- 
hind the rigid mask of a British ex-soldier I saw 
— ^what I should have suspected long before — 
peeping out — leering out, rather — the unkillable 
Celt. I was delighted and astonished. Here was 
tang added to tang. 

And O’May did not let the salt evaporate. 
Before strangers he was a trifle shy, — not incur- 
ably, a little persuasion would as a rule produce 
the desired results, — but he preferred evenings 
alone with me. An open fire, a bottle of King 
William, some tobacco handy, were all the scen- 
ery needed for extraordinary feats of mental 
conjuring. It was as if, having taken my mea- 
sure and found me an amenable victim, he had 
decided to exercise upon me to their limit the 
very great powers of his imagination. And the 
interesting part was that one never knew when 
he was telling the truth and when he was not. 
I doubt if he knew himself. 

What was back of it all baflSed me. I often 
wondered. Possibly it was the chromatic Gael, 
educated almost entirely by a reckless, hard-bit- 
ten world. In a happier age O’May would have 
sung to a harp. But this much must be said, as 
7 


John O’May 

I have said before — the total effect was magnifi- 
cent. Through all the tropic dusk and welter of 
incredible incident adventure glowed like a mon- 
strous firefly. 

He took me to Trinidad, where he had gor- 
geously failed at coca-planting; he took me to 
Ireland, where, apparently, he had been born 
rather carelessly into an aristocratic but typically 
Hibernian family; to Africa, where he had fought, 
and to India, where, as a young subaltern, he had 
served; and every time he took me he took me 
differently, nor did I ever recognize again any 
one met before. Life blossomed exotically. It 
became alchemic. One had a confused impression 
of coincidence and paradox. 

There had been a little sister of his when first 
he had gone out to India, a little sister he remem- 
bered as a wee bit slip of a thing with big blue 
eyes and yellow curls. A sunbeam she was in 
the shadows of an old, badly kept park — and 
then, apparently, he had forgotten all about her. 
You conjectured the O’Mays were an enormous 
family. Years later came a small tribal war up 
in the hills, and the regiment was ordered there, 
and with it a young chap just out from England. 
O’May hardly knew him, but found him as a 
tent-mate. A nice young fellow he was, son of 
8 


John O’May 

a Devonshire baronet. Details were never lack- 
ing. One night he tacked a photograph above 
his cot — a photograph of a girl in evening dress — 
very lovely, astonishingly lovely. O’May felt his 
heart stirred, and there came the glimmerings of 
memory. “Who’s that ?” he asked. 

“Cordelia.” 

“Cordelia who?” 

“Cordelia O’May. My fiancee.” 

Cordelia O’May ! Fancy it! ’Way out there, 
thousands of miles from anywhere, meeting your 
future brother-in-law in such a fashion ! . . . Ex- 
actly! Fancy it! 

And then there was the adventure of the nose. 
One falls naturally into the language of the Ara- 
bian Nights when speaking of O’May. It was a 
curious nose, I must admit. It presented obvi- 
ous opportunity for the narrative gift. Half-way 
down its thin, flexible length it was broken dis- 
tinctly and badly, and the lower half seemed not 
altogether connected with what had gone before. 
To O’May’s countenance it added a finishing 
touch of diablerie, a supplementary leer, also an 
additional interest. Here, at all events, was a 
man to whom something of moment had once 
happened, even if it was no more than falling 
forcibly and dramatically down-stairs. 

9 


John O’May 

One night he told me about his nose; I had 
suspected he would. 

“It’s an imitation nose,” he said. 

“A what?” 

“An imitation nose. It doesn’t belong to me, 
at least the lower half doesn’t. I lost it through 
a dirty Swede in one of old Botha’s commandos.” 

There was no use in asking how in a cavalry 
skirmish one could have ascertained the nation- 
ality of one’s adversary. I awaited the sequel in 
silence. O’May had been removed to a hospital. 
They thought he wouldn’t live. But he did. 
When he was convalescent there presented itself 
the question of his nose. How possibly could he 
go through life with such a ridiculous subtraction 
of feature? One imagined a hospital distraught 
over O’May’s nose. Then out of the sunshine of 
an African day stepped a lady — a veiled lady — a 
lady who refused to give her name. About the 
incident was all the unexpectedness and fierceness 
of Oriental romance. And what had the lady 
come for ? She had come to offer the skin of her 
knee to help restore O’May’s shattered counte- 
nance. “And so you see,” he said, “it isn’t my 
nose at all, it’s the lady’s.” 

As to the pursuit of the vivid chance, he ex- 
hibited unexpected delicacy. How could he ? 

10 


John O^May 

How as a gentleman? Had the lady wanted 
him to know who she was she would have told 
him. No, one shouldn’t disturb impalpabilities 
such as this. The whole thing was so delicate, so 
tenderly intriguing — and then he laughed — “and 
so damned ridiculous!” and suggested just the 
touch of Rabelaisianism for which one was look- 
ing. 

Of course O’May could not live even in a great 
city without becoming known. There came a 
period of wide and sweeping popularity. His 
name was on every one’s lips; every one repeated 
his stories; he was asked about constantly. Older 
women found him stirringly alien; younger women, 
possessed of an air of danger sufficient to be in- 
teresting; and the men, although from the first 
most of them did not like him, were grimly un- 
able to overlook his undoubted skill at games. 
He played polo unexpectedly well; he rode across 
country like the crack of a whip; and in cricket 
he achieved almost immortal fame. I mention 
cricket particularly because it is important in 
O’May ’s story; very important. By mere chance 
he was asked if he was interested in the placid 
game. . . . Oh, a little. He had played, of 
course — at school. ... He appeared in flannels 
and promptly knocked out a century. Playing 

II 


John O’May 

myself, I marvelled at his slashing but singularly 
invulnerable style. 

O’May accepted all this in the same uncon- 
cerned way in which he had accepted his year of 
leanness and obscurity; but such casual versatility 
is likely to bring a certain amount of disaster in 
its train. Before long I found that disaster had 
happened. O’May was not designed for unruf- 
fled good fortune. The thing grew prodigiously. 
I realized its seriousness when one day I called 
upon an old friend of mine, a woman to whom a 
gift for frankness had become an affectation. 
She attacked me on the subject of O’May. I 
found myself submerged in a flood of condemna- 
tion. It was a dam bursting. To combat it 
seemed useless. . . . But he was not a gentle- 
man! He boasted of amorous adventure. . . . 
Did he mention names . No, but what dif- 
ference did that mal^e ? He was not the sort of 
person one should introduce to young women. 
He said he had been in the English army. Well, 
if he had been, for what reason had he left ? He 
told some ridiculous story about having married 
for money and then having been forced by the 
insane jealousy of a woman he did not love to 
throw up his commission and obtain a divorce. 
Likely, wasn’t it At all events, she for one 
would have no more to do with him. . . . 


12 


John O’May 

I sipped my tea and reflected with dumb re- 
sentment on the impossibility of destroying preju- 
dice, old or new. Of course O’ May was a gen- 
tleman; everything about him, his hands, his 
voice, his figure, the real ideas that lay back of 
all his abracadabra were those of a gentleman. 
As to his absurd self-glorification, at his very 
gloomiest he was most inclined to bolster up fail- 
ing vanity by means of imaginary triumphs. Be- 
sides, there was always that business of being a 
derelict — the inevitable disdain and bitterness. 
Frequently the world must have seemed a place 
of too many complacent people, of judgments too 
cruelly made, of an unrelieved monogamous pla- 
cidity. The desire to shock it would be over- 
whelming. But how prove all these things ? It 
involved the whole question of what a gentleman 
is. Why, I have an uncle who regards all Metho- 
dists as blackguards ! 

I went out into streets already lit with lamps. 
A fine rain was falling. I was angry and ashamed. 
I do not like to have people’s characters flayed 
in my presence. There is a suggestion about 
it of the indecency of tortured bodies on the 
rack. Besides, I had had no idea of the size 
of the storm gathering in O’May’s wake. The 
prospect alarmed me. 

And then — ^just at this precarious period — 

13 


John O’May 

O’May brought matters to a climax by a bit of 
egregious folly peculiarly his own. I don’t won- 
der he left the English army. I have an idea 
that he irritated fond but distracted superiors to 
final angry tears. 

There was a girl — I shall call her Elinor Beech 
— ^who for two or three years had basked in a 
reputation for beauty. Further description is un- 
necessary, for perfection implies finality. You 
saw Miss Beech, you admitted her radiance, then 
nothing more happened. As for myself, by the 
hour I talked to her gently, all the while asking 
in the back of my mind, “What in the world are 
you doing, and where in the world are you go- 
ing?” For in a perfectly unconscious but coldly 
heated way she was going somewhere. That was 
evident. She possessed the bright, small, golden- 
haired way of looking busy and alert when she 
really wasn’t. Poor child, life after all must have 
been to her a waste of level pulchritudes. For 
several years I had felt sorry for her, but my sor- 
row now changed to indignation when I per- 
ceived that in her brisk flight from flower to 
flower she had alighted upon the somewhat frost- 
bitten leaves of O’May. 

To my extreme irritation O’May welcomed the 
distraction. He began to fancy himself as a 
suitor. He blossomed out into flowers in his 

14 


John O’May 

buttonhole and yellow buckskin gloves. To me 
the whole affair smacked of speculation, with the 
addition, of course, of fatuous gratification at the 
ensnarement of a much-desired beauty. I con- 
fronted O’May with these opinions. He accepted 
them with his usual calm. I informed him that 
Miss Beech belonged to what might be called 
“our American royalty”; and that he was twice 
her age, penniless, and divorced. “ Divorced, you 
understand!” I repeated. He looked at me 
mildly. “But I’m not divorced,” he said. 

I gasped. “Not divorced?” 

“No.” 

“Then why, in heaven’s name did you tell such 
a lie?” 

For a moment he was thoughtful, but not em- 
barrassed. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know,” 
he observed finally. “If I could remember the 
circumstances, no doubt I could explain satisfac- 
torily.” Then he brightened perceptibly. “But 
once a story’s told you have to stick by it, don’t 
you?” He seemed much relieved by this bit of 
superlative wisdom. 

I washed my hands of him. For a while he did 
not come any longer to see me. Two months 
passed and rumors were abroad. The older 
Beeches, the infatuated Beech mother and father, 
were, it seems, at last awake to the situation. 

15 


John O’May 

Three generations of restraint had been flung 
aside. Mr. Beech, a choleric man, made lawless 
by extreme wealth, had threatened to kick O’May. 
O’May had laughed delightedly and had offered 
him a back for this purpose, warning him, how- 
ever, as an apoplectic elderly person, to indulge 
in the new exercise gently. It was evident that 
he had made himself, to a man without humor, 
unbearably offensive. The world overlooked the 
engaging debonairness of this incident in its rage 
at O’May as a discredited adventurer. It was 
clear that even if willy-nilly he married Elinor 
Beech she would take no wealth with her. Mr. 
Beech had threatened disinheritance, and he was 
one of those men who pride themselves on keep- 
ing their word, no matter how foolish that word 
may be. He was bitter with the bitterness of 
the disenchanted parent. 

Then summer came, and for me, at least, a 
respite from all such vexing problems. 

It was Dunstan — Dunstan, delightfully heed- 
less of gossip — ^who in his vague, guileless way 
produced a crisis and a drama. He gave a house 
party early in September. I am sure O’May was 
not aware that his captive princess was to be 
present, and as for her she was either equally 
ignorant or else had lied adroitly to her parents. 

i6 


John O^May 

At all events, they both turned up smiling, met 
in the hall, hesitated, seemed to wish to blush, 
and then, in the pleasure of seeing each other 
after a separation of three months, forgot all 
about everything else. The rest of us, with the 
exception of Dunstan, who was completely inno- 
cent, proceeded to sit apprehensively upon the 
edge of the crater. 

The objects of our speculation meanwhile went 
their way as if oblivious of the talk swirling about 
them. I think they were happy. O’May, who 
shared a room with me, was preoccupied and gen- 
tler than I had ever seen him. In the violet 
breathless dusks before dinner the two walked 
in the gardens, or found inadequate excuses to 
motor. In the evenings they did not join us at 
cards or dancing, but sat on the terrace watching 
the immense, warm stars. Once or twice I came 
upon them. I must admit even my disapproving 
imagination was touched. There was something 
about O’May ’s lean, quiet, dark-headed figure 
that seemed to pick him out as a mate for the 
tiny, radiant fairness of the girl. Nature seemed 
to be wiser in this instance than Mr. Beech. 
After all, why not I found myself arguing the 
situation in my mind. The question was — Was 
O’May really in love.f* He seemed to be. One 

17 


John O’May 

night he stood by the window and stretched wide 
his arms* 

“A man’s never old, Billy,” he said, ^‘is he ? I 
was thinking I was, but Fm not. Lord love you !” 
He paused. “She’s sweeter than June,” he said 
in his softest Irish voice. 

The revelation pleased me. There seemed here 
a chance of complete regeneration. The prospect 
suddenly became secure, vivacious, reillusioned. 
And then a Packard car — a large, plum-colored 
Packard car — put an end to such unsubstantiali- 
ties. 

I found it — the car — standing in the driveway 
before Dunstan’s house one afternoon as I came 
in late from riding. A smart chauffeur dozed in 
the last rays of the sun. Frogs croaked from a 
near-by pond, upon the shimmering surface of 
which gossamer flying things caught, for a mo- 
ment as brief as their lives, a glory of light on 
their wings. I was not prepared for the red, 
carefully plump gentleman, clad in a fawn-colored 
silk suit, who sat in a wicker chair on the porch, 
his hands clasped determinedly upon a heavy 
walking-stick. The elderly gentleman glared at 
me; the carmine of his face was heightened by the 
level rays of the sun. 

“Are you Dunstan he growled. 

i8 




John O’May 

“No, Mr. Beech,” I answered amiably — my 
heart leapt. “You don’t remember me, I see.” 
I introduced myself. He seemed to regard the 
formality as an added irritation. 

“Where is the fellow — the — the — ^what’s his 
name ?” 

But at that moment I saw the unsuspecting 
Dunstan approaching and I fled stableward. 
There was not a motor to be had, but I procured 
a horse. The saddling seemed unbearably slow. 
I was afraid O’May and the girl would arrive be- 
fore I could warn them. I galloped down the 
driveway. And then — after all this, they were 
late; absurdly and fatally late. 

I waited by the gate at the end of the mile-long 
drive. A great moon swung up over the liquid 
darkness of the hills to the east. Would they 
never come ? Then I heard the purr of a motor 
and the long gray car swept past me in a blinding 
arc of light. O’May’s voice reached me. 

“What’s wrong?” he said sharply. 

I stammered. “It’s none of my business, but 
Mr. Beech — ^your father. Miss Beech — is waiting 
for you up at the house. I thought I would warn 
you.” 

There was a moment’s silence before the girl’s 
voice said, a trifle wearily: 

19 


John O’May 

“It’s almost nine o’clock.” 

I moved my horse to where the dazzling light 
was no longer in my eyes. O’May, his hand on 
the wheel, was looking at the girl. Suddenly he 
flung up his head. 

“If you’re game,” he said, “so am I. I’m sick 
of this. Let’s get through with it.” 

He threw in the clutch and the great machine 
groaned and leaped forward. I followed at a 
hand-gallop. 

I had imagined nothing out of the ordinary; 
nothing, that is, on the surface, or I would not, 
when I came back from the stable, have gone in 
at the front entrance. As it was I stumbled sud- 
denly into a strange, excited little group in one 
corner of the shadowy hall. Dunstan, astonished 
and ill at ease, stood with his hands in his pock- 
ets, and near him, but not noticing him, O’May 
and Elinor Beech and her father. The last was 
expressing some opinion in a restrained but obvi- 
ously passionate voice. O’May was fingering a 
book on the table, his eyes first on the older man, 
then on the girl. 

I was congratulating myself on slipping past 
unnoticed, but Mr. Beech saw me. “Here!” he 
said. “Here’s a man I want. I watched him 
gallop down to the gate — gallop right past me. 

20 


John O’May 

Now, sir, what did you do that for?’’ — I realized 
what a fool I had been — ‘‘Why, may I ask ?” 

I stepped into the circle of light. 

“Mr. Beech,” I said, “I am not aware what 
particular houses you adorn, but judging from 
the way you are acting here they must be curious 
houses. Where I live, gentlemen can ride at a 
gallop any time they like without being asked 
nonsensical questions by comparative strangers.” 

O’May threw back his head. He never could 
resist such moments as this. I suppose more 
than anything else they were what had ruined 
him. 

“Oh, I say!” he applauded. “Oh, by Jove! 
Got just what he deserved, didn’t he.?” 

“You fool!” hissed Dunstan. 

Very satisfactory, of course; very satisfactory, 
indeed; but can you imagine any idiocy greater? 
I can’t. The effect upon Mr. Beech was instan- 
taneous. For a moment he glared; then he turned 
once more to his daughter and spoke in a new 
and peculiarly deadly voice: 

“I will waste no more words. My motor is 
waiting outside. You can come home with me, 
Elinor, or else never speak to me again. You un- 
derstand ? You know when I say a thing I mean 
it. As for you, sir,” — he wheeled upon O’May — 
21 


John O’May 

“beggar that you are, Fll make you still more of 
one. I can do it and you know it.” He looked 
at his watch. “You have five minutes, Elinor,” 
he said quietly. 

It was incredible. The kind of scene one does 
not expect. Life had suddenly slipped back to 
a more brutal period. Old age in a passion has 
a way sometimes of producing such anachron- 
isms. 

I watched attentively O’May’s face and the 
face of the girl. I was hoping — hoping bitterly, 
now — that she would step forward. I for one 
would help O’May if she married him; so would 
Dunstan. Why didn’t she move ? Her great 
eyes were wide and staring. Her small, beauti- 
fully chiselled features seemed frozen to ice. 
God knows what processes of computation and 
balance were going on behind them. Possibly 
this was the first time in all her life she had been 
called upon to think. It was unbearable. Then 
O’May made a sudden movement. 

He laid aside with the most curious care the 
book the leaves of which he had been absent- 
mindedly fluttering and stepped nearer to Mr. 
Beech. His whole appearance had undergone a 
subtle change. The fierce intentness was past; 
he was careless and reckless and half-smiling 
22 


John O’May 

again. He thrust his hands deep in his trouser- 
pockets and jingled some keys. 

‘HVe lost, Mr. Beech,” he said, and inclined 
his head. ^‘You can take your daughter home.” 

Dunstan gasped. The girl suddenly stepped 
back and put out a hand, but O’May did not 
notice it. 

“And IVe something more to tell you,” he con- 
tinued; “I ” 

But the older man appreciated victory. “Not 
a word, sir,” he said. He turned to go. 

O’May leaned against the table. “Oh, very 
well,” he agreed amiably, his gray eyes smiling, 
his brogue very thick. “Only I think ye’d do 
well to listen.” 

Mr. Beech hesitated. 

“It’s just this,” said O’May. “At present ye 
think Elinor’s a fool, don’t ye .? Well, she’s not, 
Mr. Beech; far from it. I’m an old hand; it wasn’t 
very difficult for me.” 

“What wasn’t.?” 

“Well, a lot of things. To tell her my brother 
was a baronet, and had no children. To say I’d 
be worth a million or two in a short while. To 
show her pictures of the place of a distant cousin 
and let her believe it was one day to be mine. 
To try to elope with her to-night.” He paused 
23 


John O’May 

and looked about for the effect of this announce- 
ment. ‘‘Yes, just that, Mr. Beech. If it hadn’t 
been for her common sense we’d not be here now. 
That’s what made us late. But she wouldn’t do 
it. She has lots of sense. She’s” — he looked at 
her with a sudden proud, fatherly look — “she’s a 
girl of character, Mr. Beech; take her home and 
be good to her.” 

There was silence, and then: 

“You cad!” said the older man. “Go home 
to your divorced wife.” 

“My divorced wife?” asked O’May gently. 
“Which one, Mr. Beech ?” 

“Which one!” 

“Yes, you didn’t know I’d been divorced twice, 
did you?” 

This was too much. I stepped forward. 
“There’s not a word — ” I began; but Mr. Beech 
was already on his way to the door. Over his 
shoulder I caught a glimpse of a delicate gold 
head. The girl looked back once. Her face was 
small and white and perplexed. 

The three of us who were left remained for a 
moment silent by the table, then Dunstan abruptly 
swung on his heel and made off down a dim cor- 
ridor toward a door from which came the voices 
of his other guests. I went out into the garden. 

24 


John O’May 

Late that night I found O’May in our bed- 
room, smoking a cigarette and regarding the 
moon. ‘‘Well,” I said, “I hope you’ve made 
enough of an ass of yourself to satisfy even you.” 

He threw away his cigarette and stood up to 
the full length of his lean height and stretched 
his arms above his head. 

“Oh, no,” he said. “Thank God, there’s al- 
ways some future foolishness left in the world.” 

“Would you mind telling me,” I demanded, 
“why to an already unpleasant incident you 
chose to add a string of insane lies ?” 

He shrugged his shoulders. “Certainly,” he 
said; and for the first time I had a complete im- 
pression of a stricken face. Why, the man had 
been in love with the foolish little creature, after 
all! Really in love! “It’s very simple,” he 
continued, and yawned. One recognizes those 
yawns. “While there was a chance, you know; 
but there wasn’t, not a chance. I know women’s 
faces. Not a chance. Money wins every time. 
Well, it’s a good horse. What do you expect.? 
But she might just as well be off with flying colors 
as not, mightn’t she? Otherwise, all her life — 
the suspicion of her being an idiot. You don’t 
know the Beeches. It’d be hell. Don’t you 
think I gave Elihor a reputation for an eye to 

25 


John O^May 

the main chance? She couldn’t have thought 
that up herself, you know.” He cocked an eye- 
brow. “Besides,” he concluded, “when my imag- 
ination gets started. I’ll be hanged if I know 
where it’s going to stop.” 

He sighed and returned to the window. His 
muffled voice reached me. “And I’ll be damned 
if it wasn’t the little devil herself who tried to 
do the running away to-night. I had the deuce 
of a time bringing her home.” 

And that was all. 

I should hate having to leave O’May here; I 
should hate having to leave him spattered with 
the laughter of people not wise enough to be 
kind; to abandon him drearily lonely in a city 
where once, for a short time at least, he had been 
so welcome; and, fortunately, I don’t have to. 
Life has its own jocose methods of compensa- 
tion. It slaps you down into the mud, and then 
comes a great wind that lifts you up to the very 
gates, clean-swept, of heaven itself. There was 
to be for O’May at least one moment left of glory 
and illumination~a moment the spreading fame 
of which caused, I think, numerous people to 
stand agape at their own stupidity. The mo- 
ment came because O’May played cricket. 

Spring was on hand and with it the trip of a 
26 


John O’May 

team to the West Indies. There had been some 
talk, I dare say, of leaving O’May off, but even 
the blackest social record cannot destroy the 
value of a top-batsman; and so, unruffled and un- 
concerned, he went along. In his smart tweed 
cap and beautifully fitting ready-made clothes he 
was a sight for the eye as he paced the deck. 
Something about his leanness and hardness 
seemed to make a voyage tropic-ward singularly 
appropriate. And, as far as any one could see, 
he was totally oblivious of the truth that, barring 
myself, the dozen other men of the party despised 
him utterly. Fortunately they were all too good 
sportsmen — all but one, that is — to make this 
dislike known. The one was a man named 
Whitton. In every body of men there seems to 
be a Whitton. Possibly the fact perpetuates a 
curse of Job. Whitton was short and dark and 
truculent, and, to his own mind, amusing — no, 
not amusing, subtly witty — any adjective express- 
ing delicate humor will do. One gets tired of 
describing Whittons. Why he marked O’May as 
a victim I do not know, for I doubt if off the 
cricket-field they saw each other more than once 
or twice in a year. But, at all events, Whitton 
pursued O’May, and O’May, with his usual per- 
verse humor, although the rest of us expected a 
27 


John O'May 

quarrel, showered kindnesses on Whitton’s head. 
We were at a loss to understand until, one day 

*'1 can’t help liking the little devil, you know,” 
said O’May to a group of us; '‘he’s exactly like a 
stud-groom we used to have at my father’s place. 
Vulgar little brute, but something fascinating 
about him.” 

The remark was repeated, as it was intended it 
should be, and an abrupt change took place in 
Whitton’s playful venom — the playfulness disap- 
peared. O’May was more cordial than ever. 

We dropped into a blue harbor that took a 
half-moon slice out of a green- and-white island 
impossibly clean. There was to be a match with 
the British regiment stationed there, and the 
attendant dances, and a vice-regal reception; for 
the green-and-white island was an important 
place and boasted a governor-general. The night 
of our arrival there developed a conspiracy on 
the part of Whitton. 

I found two or three of O’May’s most ardent 
enemies in the smoking-room of the hotel. They 
seemed pleased about something. Whitton was 
doing the talking. He was not afraid of my pres- 
ence; the plan was too insolently simple to admit 
of interference. Whitton, in short, was to intro- 
duce O’May to the governor-general as "Captain 
28 


John O’May 

John O’May, late Tenth Hussars — Captain John 
O’May!” — Very loud, you understand, so that 
there would be not the slightest chance of not 
being heard. 

At first I failed to grasp the significance. 

Whitton laughed. ‘‘Guess!” he said. 

Light dawned on me. “That’s a pleasant thing 
to do to a team-mate,” I observed. “And then, 
you know, he might have been in the Tenth Hus- 
sars after all.” 

“Not a chance!” said Whitton. “He? He 
never was ! I know a liar when I see one. I’m 
sick of his lies. We’re all sick of his lies, aren’t 
we?” The attendant group nodded with sinister 
solemnity. “Why,” continued Whitton, “why, 
that’s one of the best regiments in England. Be- 
sides, even if he did belong, he was kicked out for 
some dirty work.” 

I attempted scorn. Did they think the gov- 
ernor-general of a West Indian island carried the 
whole British army list in his head ? There might 
have been a dozen O’Mays in the Tenth Hussars 
and this fellow here none the wiser. 

But Whitton persisted. It was only a chance, 
of course, but a mighty good one. The English 
army was small and rather like a club. If O’May 
had done anything disgraceful it would be recalled 
29 


John O’May 

to mind at once. If, on the other hand, he was 
merely an impostor, detection would be equally 
swift. They knew in a moment, those chaps; 
they could tell by a dozen hidden evidences not 
patent to foreigners. 

“Whitton,’’ I said, “you’re a fool. Look 
out!” 

“Who for?” he sneered. 

“Me, for one,” I said, getting up. “Besides, 
this governor-general will have too much sense to 
show you what he knows.” 

“Oh!”saidWhitton. He laughed. “Oh! So 
you think we’re right, too, do you ?” 

And as a matter of fact I did. The plot pre- 
sented all the strength of a dilemma. If O’May 
was what he said he was there was no need to 
worry; if, to the contrary, he was none of these 
things, or only part of these things, there was 
nothing to do but to let him bear the consequences 
of his own folly and trust to his quick wit for a 
not too unpleasant escape from embarrassment. 
To attempt to prevent Whitton’s plan would be 
only to fasten upon O’May forever the stamp of 
an impostor. Apparently the test was fore- 
doomed. I contented myself with visions of re- 
venge upon Whitton. 

Two days later came the first day of the match. 

30 


John O’May 

The Englishmen went in to bat. When dark 
swallowed up the grounds we were whisked olF 
to a dinner; the reception was to follow. 

Orange lamps, like little moons, hung in strange, 
heavy-foliaged trees. A band blared in an illu- 
minated kiosk. Lithe young men in regimentals 
were officially and inexpressibly polite. 

“Why don’t you get them to play some tune 
we know, O’May?” suggested Whitton happily. 

I took this to be the first gun of the skirmish. 

O’May turned. “I?” 

“Yes; weren’t you an officer?” 

O’M ay’s long nose wrinkled. “That’s not the 
same as a bandmaster, you know,” he explained 
gently. 

I was keeping close to him. The time to meet 
the governor-general was approaching. A young 
aide-de-camp stepped over to us and suggested 
that the ceremony begin. We followed in little 
groups. Besides myself and Whitton there were 
four or five others in the lot O’May joined. 

“Cheer-o !” said he. “For what is the likes of 
me greeting the direct and anointed representa- 
tive of his Britannic Majesty. What’s the old 
blighter’s name ?” 

Sir Timothy-Something-or-Other, I told him 
vaguely. 


31 


John O’May 

‘‘Quaker!” he hissed. “A dollar he’s a sour- 
faced Quaker.” 

We came to a big man, long-nosed, stooping, 
with a grizzled mustache. He looked bored. My 
heart sank. Here was not one of the kindly Eng- 
lish; rather, a veteran of many climates and varied 
indigestion. The band seemed to me to be play- 
ing with unnecessary softness. I was presented, 
bowed, heard the end of an unintelligible sentence, 
and moved a step or two away. O’May followed. 
Over his shoulder I caught sight of Whitton’s 
face. Then it seemed to me that the worst had 
happened; for suddenly the governor-general took 
a step forward, hesitated, and peered; his harsh 
face in the swaying shadows becoming for a mo- 
ment harsher. 

“Why — ” said the governor-general. “Why — 
let me see! No! Yes! By gad!” His thin, 
tired face broke into an alarming grin. “Why, 
by all that’s holy, it’s Long Jack O’May !” 

“Timmy Danby !” said O’May simply. “How 
— ^what in the devil are you doing here ?” 

In the background I stepped on Whitton’s foot. 

“I?” said the governor-general. “Why, I’m 
the governor-general!” And he spoke with ap- 
parently no realization of the absurdity of his 
remark. Emotion was evident on both sides. 

32 


John O’May 

The governor-general breathed through his nose; 
he looked about him nervously. ‘^All your fel- 
lows through?” he asked. 

‘T think so,” answered O’May. ‘‘We’re the 
last.” 

“Well, then — I’ll just say a word or two — just 
a word, and then — look here! What do you 
think ? We’ll find a place to sit down. I want 
to see you, you devil. Where’ve you been ? In 
the States? One of those blighted millionaires 
by now, I suppose. I heard you’d got out. Rot- 
ten job, the army, anyhow.” He remembered his 
duties and turned to the silent, staring little group 
about him. “I trust you’ll forgive me, gentle- 
men,” he said, “but I haven’t seen Captain 
O’May in ten years, and he was the best subal- 
tern I ever had. These young men will be de- 
lighted to look after you.” He indicated his 
aides-de-camp. 

I turned to go, still in a haze of unreality, but 
O’May called me back. “No, you don’t!” he 
said. “Do you mind, Timmy?” But his next 
action was the most extraordinary of all, for he 
laid a detaining hand on Whitton’s shoulder and 
faced him about and said, most lovingly, “And 
Jerry Whitton, too? He’s one of the best pals 
I’ve got. Can I bring ’em along?” 

33 


John O’May 

Whitton did not understand until later, I think; 
nor did I, until, looking at O’May, I saw gray 
eyes cold and raw as Irish moors on a hunting- 
day. 

Under a shadowy tree, a colored lantern spread- 
ing radiance through its branches, we found a 
table. A man servant brought us drinks. 

‘‘Long Jack!” said the governor-o^eneral. 

“Old Timmy!” said O’May. 

And this was the moment of which I spoke — 
the apotheosis of O’May. I could see him grow 
as he sat there; become younger. He was home 
— in harbor. They talked of many things — he 
and the governor-general — of India, of London, 
of men they had known; of men who had died 
and of men who were still alive. And in the 
semi-dusk, with the band sobbing a waltz and 
uniforms flitting in and out of orange light and 
shadow, with the sound of laughter reaching us, 
it seemed to me that O’May was no longer a 
derelict, no longer a man to whom the future held 
nothing, but once more a young subaltern, straight 
and taut with the pride of the great service of a 
great empire. I saw India, and keen-faced young 
men about the white and silver of a mess-table; 
I saw South Africa and heard cavalry marching 
by night across the veldt; and it wasn’t merely 
34 





On the ball, Dublin !” he said, and fell back. 




John O’May 

romancing on my part, for O’May, I knew, was 
seeing at the same time the same things as 1. It 
was easy to understand now his recklessness 
toward the present. In face of his memories it 
must have seemed, indeed, a matter of small 
moment; old Mr. Beech merely an absurdity; his 
daughter, after her fiery test, pitiable and unhe- 
roic. At one corner of the table Whitton watched 
with a troubled, embarrassed face. 

‘‘You’ll move your traps to-morrow and stay 
with me, won’t you ?” asked the governor-general. 

“Will I !” said O’May. 

That spring I was out of town for a month. I 
came back to find a telephone call, three days old, 
from O’May. It was urgent. He was in hospi- 
tal. I hurried out. Yes, Captain O’May was in. 
a private ward on the third floor. An old wound 
in his head. They would see if I might go to 
him. There was something odd in the manner 
in which they told me this. I fidgeted. I re- 
member how noisy a newly awakened fly was 
against the window-pane. A nurse came hurry- 
ing in. Yes, I could go to Captain O’May — ^yes, 
I could go, but l had best hurry. Hurry! Why, 
in God’s name, did I have to hurry ? 

He was unconscious when I reached the narrow 

35 


John O’May 

room where he was. I waited an hour; perhaps 
an hour and a half. The nurse busied herself 
with a dozen esoteric tasks. And then, suddenly, 
he sat up and opened his eyes and looked squarely 
at me. 

‘‘On the ball, Dublin!” he said, and fell back. 
I had never known that he had played football 
. . . the extraordinary man I 
When I finally left, it seemed to me as if a piece 
of romance had been ripped, as a sword rips tap- 
estry, from the walls of life. Old age for some 
people is impossible to contemplate; but then 


36 


WINGS OF THE MORNING 








WINGS OF THE MORNING 


O NE suspects an omniscient ironicism — or 
else a very great tenderness. God, appar- 
ently, doesn’t like us to become too matter-of- 
fact. At all events, no sooner have we settled 
down to the comfortable assurance that at last 
we have really grown up, that at last we have 
really achieved common sense, when, through the 
corridored hours of our days mystery blows a 
trifle harder, as it were, stirs the hair on our fore- 
heads, sends us back once more into the state of 
mind from which we thought ourselves escaped — 
confused, that is, wondering. And I suppose that 
is why people have visits like the visit, two years 
ago, of Ann Graham to the ranch of myself and 
my wife Martha, on the upper waters of the Big 
Cloud River — Ghost Bald-Head River, the In- 
dians call it, because years ago a war party of 
Cheyennes scalped some Bannocks on its green 
and beautiful banks. 

The visit grew out of the unexpected. Coming 
in late one June afternoon from riding through 
some cattle, I found Martha, with the recently 
arrived mail, scanning a newspaper a week old. 
39 


Wings of the Morning 

Suddenly she laid it down with a little gesture of 
distress and went to the window, from which she 
stared across the level green nearness of the home 
pastures to where, beyond rolling sage-brush hills, 
the great mountains that surrounded our place 
touched a twilight sky. I lit a cigarette and 
watched her slim figure, outlined in its dark rid- 
ing habit, against the square of fading light from 
outside. 

“Alastair Graham’s dead,” she said finally, 
without turning. ‘^He was shot down by a Ger- 
man. They’ve cited him for a war medal.” 
She made with her tongue a clicking sound indica- 
tive of distaste. ‘‘Most of the article about him 
has to do with the fact that he was a millionaire 
and the son of old Huntingdon Graham. As if 
even death failed to make Fifth Avenue relatively 
unimportant ! Do you want to see it — the 
paper ?” 

I expressed no exigent desire. To tell the 
truth, I wasn’t greatly moved by Alastair Gra- 
ham’s death; he wasn’t even my first cousin by 
marriage, as he was Martha’s; and too many 
splendid young men had died before him — really 
splendid young men. I had never found Alastair 
Graham particularly splendid. On the contrary, 
the few times I had met him I had found him in- 
40 


Wings of the Morning 

expressibly annoying — a tall, slim, blond youth 
with the clipped mind and the clipped syllables of 
his class and city. One felt, as one so often does 
in the presence of the young very rich, a sense of 
insult to the human race as a whole. And I didn’t 
even greatly admire his having joined the flying 
service of France. Had the circumstances been 
different — but, you must remember, he had been 
married only a year. There was too much a sus- 
picion of titillation run after; too much the sus- 
picion of a harsh tearing to shreds of life; too 
much the impression of the lumping together as 
the means of sensation beautiful young women 
and aeroplanes. Perhaps I was unjust, but I 
could imagine nothing of the lucid enthusiasm 
that must have animated most of his companions; 
nothing of the grave and splendid courage of the 
average modern man who goes, against his will, to 
war. But I admitted regret; one would; espe- 
cially in the presence of Martha, who regards 
relationship as a cloak for all incompatibility. I 
was unaware into what this passion for consan- 
guinity was to lead us. 

Within the week Martha had asked Ann 
Graham to visit us; within two weeks Ann 
Graham had accepted. Within the week Martha 
had asked, as a solace for Ann’s loneliness, Ann’s 

41 


J 


Wings of the Morning 

ancient suitor, Sturtevant Shaw, and within two 
weeks he, too, had expressed enthusiasm. These 
heroically altruistic acts performed, Martha pro- 
ceeded, with the dryness that conceals a quick 
and kindly heart, to amplify her reasons for so 
doing. They were obvious reasons. Ann was 
too young, too much alone, too lovely to be cast 
suddenly upon a careless world; recklessness had 
been her habit. We were her nearest of kin; her 
only near relatives, in fact, for it was impossible 
to count as a relative her satyr-like father-in-law. 
Clearly it was our duty to offer her, here in this 
quiet, healing land, opportunity to regain some 
degree of poise; perhaps, although this was highly 
problematical, even to achieve a new and steady- 
ing perspective. You perceive we were idealists 
of sorts. People who love beyond measure cer- 
tain countries are likely to be. They have im- 
mense faith in their curative powers — in the wide 
quality of the sea; the soaring quality of moun- 
tains. But we were not altogether idealists. 
Sturtevant Shaw was our concession to worldli- 
ness. All her life Ann, we knew, had been used 
to the attendance of the male — a sort of single-file 
triumphal procession; possibly a dim racial com- 
pulsion for adornment balked in the more primi- 
tive satisfactions of conch-shells and slaves. At 

' 42 


Wings of the Morning 

all events, since marriage — and we had little 
doubt that Ann, in her own especial way, had 
loved her husband — had not allayed this thirst, 
there was little hope that widowhood would prove 
more effective. In Ann’s social environment the 
mere presence of an habitual love was seldom 
allowed to interfere with the far more exciting 
pastime of falling in love. An innocent enough 
pastime, no doubt — certainly so we imagined in 
the case of Ann — but a pastime that none the less 
was a habit. And Sturtevant Shaw, picked from 
a visioned line of vacuous faces and debonair 
figures, seemed likely to be the least actively of- 
fensive figure of all; the most likely to supply 
Ann with the necessary piquancy devoid of tact- 
less interference with a sorrow newly acquired. 
Besides, as a mere practical matter of self-protec- 
tion, we needed some one to take Ann off our 
hands. The logical chain was complete. The 
personal question of whether we ourselves wanted 
Ann did not enter into it at all. 

I wish I could accurately convey to you my 
impressions when, a month later, in the soft violet 
of an August evening, I came upon Ann and Shaw 
on the platform of the little railroad-station fifty 
miles down the valley, whither I had been sent to 
meet them in person by a scrupulous wife. They 
43 


Wings of the Morning 

were so exactly, my impressions, what I had im- 
agined they would be. There are no eyes as sharp 
as those of the not too welcoming host. These 
two, Ann and Shaw, were so sure of themselves; 
so impeccable. One was aware from their atti- 
tude how much they felt they were bringing deli- 
cate perceptions, civilized reactions, into an un- 
couth and to-be-patronized country. And all 
about them, you see, was this still, unending twi- 
light, like eternity, and, to the east, the pregnant 
shadow of immense black hills. 

They stood in the light of a station lamp, their 
baggage piled around them, Ann slim and pale in 
her black clothes, very aureate, and her compan- 
ion short, bulbous, fashionable. He called me 
‘^old man” on the score of an acquaintanceship 
long since discontinued, and Ann, between almost 
every sentence, laughed the disconnected, unrea- 
sonable laughter of her kind. I put them to bed 
with a grim satisfaction in the notorious discom- 
forts of the local hotel. 

Wide countries, wild countries, seem to have an 
excellent sense of dramatic fitness; they rain upon 
one when rain will make for history; they snow 
when blizzards will heap up a story of adventure; 
they are beautiful when beauty is the impression 
desired; and the next day was beautiful beyond 
44 


Wings of the Morning 

compare. There was a fine sense of gold and 
blue and scintillation. With us went the cool 
sound of mountain streams, the warm scent of 
firs under a summer sun. Our way led up over 
a divide and then down into the valley beyond. 
In upland meadows Indian paint-brush flamed 
amidst the blue smoke of lupin. But apparently, 
my guests were not, as yet, prepared to concen- 
trate their minds upon this gorgeousness of scen- 
ery. It was as if they had brought with them a 
bag of unfinished conversational odds and ends 
from which they busily drew forth embroidered 
personalities and scandals, worked upon them, 
put them back, and drew forth others. There 
was about this an atmosphere of duty as much as 
one of pleasure. My elevation of soul suffered a 
relapse. Even when we had reached the summit 
and had come out of the climbing forests to a 
wind-swept place where the valley rose to meet 
us, staccato enthusiasm for matters and people 
far distant did not abate. Through the distance- 
smoothed gray and green of the plain ran the rib- 
bon of the river, and beyond, range upon range, 
blue in the August haze, was a tumultuous loveli- 
ness of further encircling hills. It was altogether 
heart-stopping. 

To be sure. ‘‘By Jove! How fine!” said 
45 


Wings of the Morning 

Shaw with the evident intention of drawing me, 
in the front seat, into the conversation. But he 
seemed unable to maintain this temporary rever- 
sion to the traditions of a gentler generation, in 
which it was considered necessary not to forget 
altogether one’s host; and as for Ann, she had the 
directness of a more primitive sex. At the mo- 
ment she was interested in something that had 
happened at Newport two years before. 

And so we drove down the hill and so by dusk 
came to the ranch. 

Along the rim of the western hills the sun had 
left a band of gold, and up to the doors of the 
ranch-house had crept the translucent blue haze 
of the evening. Here and there a window radi- 
ated yellow light, and through the quiet atmos- 
phere, layer upon layer, the approaching night 
was folding over us the mountain chill. It was 
very silent, except for the murmuring of the river 
and the creaking of leather as the tired horses 
shook their harness. I was totally unprepared 
for the unexpected gesture on the part of Ann. 

Shaw had descended from the wagon with the 
meticulous movements of an overfed and wearied 
man and had greeted Martha with his usual soft 
patronization, but Ann, when she reached the 
ground, did not at once follow him. Instead, she 
46 


Wings of the Morning 

Stood for a moment erect and very still, her face 
turned to the silhouette of the mountains, her 
head thrown back a trifle, as if she was tasting the 
air. At first I did not particularly notice her, 
and then I was suddenly struck by something in 
her attitude that suggested the calm delight of a 
swimmer who, coming to the surface, floats in the 
stillness of twilight water — a quietness, a concen- 
tration very foreign to her. But the mood passed, 
and she turned and ran up to Martha and kissed 
her. The three of them went into the house. 
A moment afterward I heard Ann’s high, nasal, 
thoughtless laughter. 

But I was not altogether unmoved. As I took 
the team down to the barns and unharnessed 
them I found myself wondering about Ann. Her 
laugh, however, still ringing in my ears, seemed 
to answer me. If there was in her some small 
seed worth cultivating, it must be a very small 
seed, indeed. Distaste was the reaction that at 
the moment followed. I was not a picture of the 
perfect host. 

When I went back to the house, Ann, sprawled 
out, with a more than ordinarily altruistic display 
of slim, silk-clad leg and ankle, in a big chair be- 
fore the fire, was complaining, with the over- 
punctuated and over-emphasized diction that, 
47 


Wings of the Morning 

with her kind, passes for humor, to Martha of the 
hardships of the journey. 

And this was my impression of Ann for the 
first two weeks of her stay; an impression over- 
laying, complementing the not particularly favor- 
able one I already had of her. This high-voiced, 
drawling, hyperbolized habit of conversation ! 
This affected habit of resentment toward unaccus- 
tomed surroundings ! This attitude of the very 
opulent that nature should in some way or other 
realize, subscribe to their exceptional position ! 
As if mountains, that is, were venerable, if slightly 
privileged, butlers. . . . During August in a cat- 
tle country, unless there is hay to be put up, a 
man has comparatively little to do, and I found 
myself acting as guide to Ann and Shaw. I took 
them long trips on horseback, I picnicked with 
them, fished, climbed through the belt of heavy 
timber that clothed the lower slopes of the hills. 
Intimacy such as this necessitates eventual hatred 
or else liking. Mere toleration is impossible. 
And, curiously enough, it was Shaw whom I began 
to like. He was not charming; there was some- 
thing about his sibilant, stuttering name that 
fitted his bulky, stuttering personality; but he 
was not the aggressive fool I had thought him. 
In reality there are probably few aggressive fools. 

48 


Wings of the Morning 

Shaw was a meek man suffering from shyness; a 
meek man with a pathetic and unexplainable in- 
terest in mediaeval art. He was even puzzled by 
his position and reason in the world, carrying 
with him a dim perception that his wealth and 
idleness were somehow adventitious, not quite to 
be taken for granted. One was reminded of a 
near-sighted, harmless bee blundered into an en- 
tangling web. And underneath his layers of in- 
eptness I discovered one altogether decisive qual- 
ity: he was entirely, splendidly, self-effacingly in 
love with Ann. He carried it like a sword be- 
neath a cloak. I think the uncertainty this dis- 
closure produced within me, the dislocation of 
my self-a;ssurance, had largely to do with a change 
that at this time took place in my attitude toward 
Ann. If I had been so utterly wrong in one in- 
stance, there was a chance that I might be wrong 
in another. At all events, my mind, beginning 
to seal itself tight, opened ever so slightly to the 
possibility of new impressions. And then, un- 
expectedly, here was Shaw breaking his usual si- 
lence in regard to subjective matters; breaking it, 
for him, with startling lucidity. The immediate 
cause was, I think, a complaint on my part of 
Ann’s habit of linking in the same breath sun- 
sets and divorce; a disillusioning habit; a habit 
49 


Wings of the Morning 

that frequently gave one the feeling of being 
pushed from a cliff into a quagmire. Shaw and 
I were riding home together into the gathering 
darkness, and I came to myself, as it were, to 
find him trying, intently, to convince me of 
something. 

^‘No — !” he stammered. '‘Not that ! No ! I 
don’t know — it’s hard to explain.” His eyes 
sought the horizon in his effort to clarify his 
thoughts. "I wish I could make Ann clear to 
people,” he continued. "Y’see, I’ve known her 
for twenty years — ever since she was a young- 
ster.” He laughed embarrassedly. "Sometimes,” 
he said, "I feel more like a father to her than any- 
thing else. You believe that, don’t you ?” 

"Yes,” I answered, "I do.” I hastened to re- 
lieve any misconception on his part. “I am not 
criticising Ann particularly,” I added; "I am 
merely wondering about her type, that’s all. It’s 
a prevalent type. It’s about three-fourths of 
our so-called upper class. They’re like bright- 
winged grasshoppers, these women; just as fever- 
ish and strident and apparently fortuitous. What 
makes them; what are they after?” 

He looked taken aback by this sudden flood of 
psychologic questioning. "I don’t know what 
makes them,” he answered at length; "bad condi- 

50 


Wings of the Morning 

tions, I suppose. But I dare say even grasshop- 
pers have some purpose at the back of their ac- 
tions. And these people are only trying in their 
untrained way to find the same few fundamental 
things that other people, better trained, know 
how to go after directly. Fm a grasshopper my- 
self, you know.’’ 

I found myself voluble with the pent-up irrita- 
tion of a fortnight. ‘‘How the devil,” I exclaimed, 
bringing my fist down on the horn of my saddle, 
“can a woman who has been through what Ann 
has been through still remain what Ann is ? Can 
you explain it? I think in place of the old vir- 
ginal attitude about the body that used to be 
the fashion there’s come a new perverted virginal 
frame of mind — not about sex ! Good Lord, no ! 
— but about life as it really is. A refusal to ac- 
cept its poignancy; a desire to skim across its 
surface as if it were the thin edge of lava above a 
volcano. Was Ann in the least in love with Ala- 
stair?” 

He nodded his head gravely. “Oh, yes,” he 
answered, “greatly.” 

“I don’t believe it,” I rejoined. “Not for a 
moment. Ann and women like her are dried 
pomegranates.” 

He seemed shocked, but he was willing to ad- 

51 


Wings of the Morning 

mit that my remarks were, after all, meant as 
general ones. “You don’t know Ann,” he said 
at length doggedly. “I don’t know her myself.” 
He straightened up in his saddle and looked at 
me with an intent, brooding look. “Ann’s 
changed, you know. Ann never was quite as 
feverish as she is now. Sometimes I think she 
must be afraid of something.” 

“Afraid ?” 

“Yes.” 

“Of what?” 

Inspiration deserted him. “I don’t know,” he 
said lamely; “I often wonder. But people do 
cover up fear with words, don’t they ? She’s so 
determinedly hard, isn’t she? As if she was 
afraid to let herself go; as if she was anxious to 
hang on to all the old tricks for killing thought 
that she knows.” He lit a cigarette with fat, too 
soft hands that trembled a little as he did so. 
“You don’t get Ann,” he concluded. “None of 
us do. We don’t get any one ever but very 
clever, expressive people, and then we usually 
get them wrong. Nobody’s a fool to themselves. 
And almost everybody over twenty-five’s suffer- 
ing like hell about something — even when they 
don’t clearly realize it themselves.” 

Extraordinary, wasn’t it ? It set one to think- 

s' 


Wings of the Morning 

ing why it is usually the disjointed, careless 
people who in the end achieve the kindliest, 
truest philosophy. But I was not to any ex- 
tent convinced. One wouldn’t be so sudden- 
ly. I merely found myself studying Ann more 
closely. 

There were about her certain obvious things 
worth studying. Her mouth, for instance. I rec- 
ollected that on previous occasions this mouth of 
Ann’s had puzzled me — it was a lovely mouth, 
thin, red, with the hint of a curve to one corner of 
it; apparently an adventitious mouth; a mouth 
much too likely to disarm criticism. I congratu- 
lated myself, as I again recollected having done 
several times in the past, that I was proof against 
most forms of purely extrinsic pulchritude. Ann 
sat opposite me at meal-times, and at supper, 
beneath the descending light of candles under red 
shades, with which Martha had insisted upon 
decking the table of a Wyoming ranch-house, I 
had particularly excellent opportunity to observe 
the lower half of Ann’s face; the lower half, with 
that mouth striking upon the senses like the sin- 
gle note of a sudden bell on a warm afternoon. 
One could not but remark, could not tut be con- 
sistently irritated at the discrepancy between its 
sweet poignancy and the usual words that fell 
53 


Wings of the Morning 

from it. There seemed here a striking instance 
of the lavish carelessness of nature. I resented 
this lavish carelessness of nature; resented it in- 
creasingly; quite unlooked for, Ann heightened 
my perplexity. The incident was like the opening 
and closing of a lantern shutter in a dark room. 
Upon a certain night Ann came to me with a book 
in her hand. 

Every one else was, I think, in bed. I was 
reading by the fire in the living-room. The great 
room, log-walled, hung with skins, was very quiet 
and softly illumined. In the room beyond I 
heard Ann rummaging amongst the shelves of our 
disassorted library, and presently she was by my 
side, leaning over my chair. 

“Do you think this is true ?” she asked. 

I looked down casually, but not without some 
interest, for this was a new and quiet tone of voice 
on her part. My faint interest turned abruptly 
to astonishment; she was holding out before me 
the Psalms. 

You can imagine the incongruity of Ann hold- 
ing out the Psalms ! Thirty years ago the Anns 
of the world would have known them by heart, 
but not nowadays. 

“Do you think it is true?” she insisted. “I 
had forgotten all about it.” 

54 


Wings of the Morning 


I read: 

Whither shall I go from thy spirit ? or whither shall 
I flee from thy presence ? 

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make 
my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. 

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the 
uttermost parts of the sea; . . . 

“And this She indicated a preceding para- 
graph with her finger. 

“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is 
high, I cannot attain unto it.” 

I twisted about in my chair so that I could look 
up into her face. For a moment her eyes opened 
wide into mine, then fell in embarrassment, like 
those of a child who has asked what may prove a 
foolish question. 

“What do you mean, Ann ?” I said. 

Her words faltered a little. “I — I don’t know 
exactly how to express it,” she began. “I’ve 
never had anything like it to express before. It 
— it’s the feeling that you are never any more 
alone, you see — I don’t mean people — but — at 
night it’s as if there was no roof to your room at 
all, as if it was all open to the stars. Do you 
suppose it is what our mothers and fathers used 
to call religion ?” 


55 


Wings of the Morning 

‘‘I suppose so/’ I answered. “It’s what they 
meant, even if they didn’t feel it. Have you 
ever read ‘The Hound of Heaven’ ?” 

She shook her head. “What a queer name!” 
she said. She gathered together her words as if 
afraid they might stumble too lamely. “You 
see,” she explained, “it never used to be this way. 
I was always thinking of something very near; of 
what was going to happen in the next hour, or at 
night, of what would happen the next day.” She 
hesitated as if struck by a sudden objection. 
“But suppose,” she stammered, “suppose this 
were true, suppose God or something did notice 
people, do you suppose he would choose an unim- 
portant person — a person like myself?” 

Unimportant ! Here was further revelation 1 
“Perhaps there’s no choosing about it,” I sug- 
gested. “Perhaps the thing you’re talking about 
is with every one, always, only needing something 
to call it forth. Besides, I’ve never heard about 
importance or unimportance in this connection. 
Do you think yourself unimportant ?” 
f She looked down at me with a swift, troubled 
glance. “Yes,” she said breathlessly, “for the 
first time in my life.” 

With a fluttering movement she slipped around 
past me and sat down on the black bearskin that 

56 


Wings of the Morning 

covered the hearth, cross-legged, her chin in her 
hand, her eyes brooding upon the glowing logs. 

I sucked at my pipe and gazed at the slim, 
childlike figure at my feet. The light from the 
fire touched the gold of her hair with deeper color 
and heightened the pure outline of her face. I 
experienced that odd consciousness of the imma- 
teriality of the flesh that sometimes, very rarely, 
and then only in especial moods, comes to all of 
us in the presence of another person; a strange 
elation, an impulse of inspiration, a piercing ten- 
derness for this person as a symbol of all baffled, 
inexpressive humanity. Ann might have been 
stepping out of her ordinary self as a flame steps 
out of the indurateness of a log. But the mood 
faded; faded with some confusion on my part 
that apparently my convictions could so easily 
be upset. 

Ann stirred from her revery. Perhaps she, 
too, was a trifle ashamed. She stood up briskly. 

‘‘It’s late,” she said. “Good night!” 

The morning is as cruelly and healthily matter- 
of-fact as the night so often is cruelly meretricious. 
Ann possessed my midnight, but Ann failed en- 
tirely to intrigue my breakfast. I felt slightly 
indignant, as if I had been let in for something, 
she appeared so full-armored, even to too much 
57 


Wings of the Morning 

powder on her nose; she was so brightly vigorous, 
intent upon an expedition that she and Shaw had 
planned for the day. And yet I was not very 
angry with her; in reality I was rather relieved. 
It is disturbing to have one’s preconceived ideas 
upset. However gratifying it may be to discover 
a soul where before no soul has been suspected, 
it is always disconcerting. It is so much easier to 
keep people in the categories where you have put 
them; spiritual jacks-in-boxes are upsetting. I 
was amused at myself. 

But I need not have been. Revealing episodes 
are never isolated except where people fail to see 
each other again. The first, the second, are like 
little trickles of water from a dam; presently the 
dam breaks loose. 

August had begun to spread comparatively hot 
nights across the valley, and now to these had 
been added the unearthly white radiance of a full 
moon in great altitudes. There was no dark at 
all except in the early evenings, and one felt the 
sustained exaltation that is part of a temporary 
escape from the laws of the universe. As I had 
business to transact in the more distant parts of 
my ranch, I chose the nights to ride in. It was 
easier on my horse; there was a mystic delight in 
galloping into the pellucid gold of the air. As a 

58 


Wings of the Morning 

rule I came back late. The ranch would be 
asleep; a pool of shadowy trees, of shadowy 
houses, incredibly undisturbed. My dog would 
come out to lick my hand, tiptoeing, it seemed, 
his nose cold with the crispness that even in warm 
weather is never very far away from mountain 
countries. On one of these nights I came across 
Ann. 

She was standing just beyond a little grove of 
aspen-trees through which ran the road from the 
main gate into my place, and I did not see her 
until my horse snorted and shied to one side, for 
in the white cloak she had on she seemed part of 
the moonlight and of the delicate, ghostly silver 
of the trunks behind her. Apparently she had 
not heard my approach, for she gave no sign of 
noticing me; did not stir from her rigid attitude; 
her hands clasped in front of her; her head thrown 
back as if she was looking at something far down 
the valley. For a moment or so I watched her 
from my horse, then I dismounted and walked 
toward her, not entirely conscious as yet of the 
oddness of the situation, I imagine I began with 
the customary laugh. 

‘‘Ann!’’ 

I took her arm. The eerie unpleasantness that 
is part of meeting a person walking in sleep con- 
59 


Wings of the Morning 

tracted my fingers. But she was not asleep. 
Her eyes recognized me fully as she turned her 
head slowly toward me. ^'Oh,” she said, ‘^so it’s 
you, is it ?” 

“Yes; what are you doing?” No doubt my 
voice was sharp with the impatience of the mas- 
culine mind suspecting feminine excitability. At 
all events, I was not prepared for Ann’s next ac- 
tion. Suddenly she raised her clinched hands 
and beat impotently upon my breast. 

“Oh, you!” she sobbed. “All of you! You 
laugh at me because I don’t understand! You 
think I’m a fool! No one has ever shown me 
how to understand!” And she turned and fled 
through the trees. For a few feet I pursued her; 
then I went quietly back to my horse. Here was 
a growing accumulation of things to think over. 
What couldn’t Ann understand ? Oddly enough 
the idea of hysteria never occurred to me. Some- 
how it seemed too far removed from Ann’s shrewd, 
if staccato, personality. 

Nor did Ann the next day mention the scene 
of the night before. Her very silence gave to it 
an added weight. I wondered if it was her cus- 
tom to walk alone, by night, and to search the 
horizon with her eyes. 

Presently a new attitude began to show itself 
6o 


Wings of the Morning 

in Shaw. Hitherto the most unassuming of suit- 
ors, he developed symptoms of pressing his desires 
more ardently; of pressing them with an unfailing 
ardor. Apparently he could never see enough of 
Ann. He exhibited unusual determination and 
ingenuity in capturing her for himself alone. In 
the evenings he had always an endless lot to say 
to her. I would see them in front of the ranch- 
house, walking in and out of the shadows of the 
trees, talking earnestly. With the inevitable 
idiocy of mankind in this respect I thought this 
well. If Shaw could only begin to interest Ann 
in his own thoroughly healthy and material per- 
son ! Shaw himself put an end to such idyllic 
conjectures. He burst in upon me late one night, 
when I was writing at my desk, and, although I 
did not look up, I felt the presence of his disturb- 
ance. 

“Well?” I said, turning about. 

He was lighting a cigarette with little jerky 
movements. Under his ridiculous upturned mus- 
tache his lips were drawing in and out like the 
neck of an agitated frog. 

“What’s the matter?” I asked, laying down 
my pen. 

He flicked the ashes off his cigarette. ^ “Ann,” 
he said shortly. 


Wings of the Morning 

‘‘Ann?” 

“Yes.” He was greatly distressed, greatly 
confused, wanted greatly to talk. 

“I can’t make her out at all,” he said in a mo- 
notonous, halting voice. Suddenly he stood up 
straight, his hands deep in his pockets, and faced 
me squarely, his jaws set doggedly. “Look 
here!” he asked. “Did you ever know a sane 
person to talk about wings ?” 

“Wings ? What do you mean ?” 

“Just that. Talk about hearing ’em at night! 
Talk about wings coming and going in the air! 
And yet she’s sane; I know it. To-night I told 
her she was like one of those people you read 
about in medicine who’s been hit in such a way 
that part of them’s dead. Everything else going 
on all right, you see, but part of them dead. I — 
I got damned mad with her. You do, you know, 
when ...” 

“Yes,” I agreed, “you do.” 

“Well, I suddenly found she was laughing. 
Not at me, you understand, but as if to herself — 
quietly; you might say happily. That was queer 
enough, but what she said was queerer still. She 
put her hand on my arm. ‘Poor old Sturdy,’ 
she said; ‘so you think part of me is dead, do 
you ? Isn’t that odd ? Why, it’s the only part 
62 


Wings of the Morning 

of me that’s ever been really alive. You’re a 
ghost, and most of me’s a ghost, and almost all 
our friends are ghosts; funny, bloodless little 
ghosts, in a world one-half of which, perhaps the 
most important half, we never raise our eyes to 
look at or strain our ears to hear.’ ” Shaw spread 
out his arms. “And now,” he asked, “what in 
God’s name do you make of that ?” 

“Was that all?” 

“No, it wasn’t. You remember how, about an 
hour ago, tliere were queer little black clouds 
sailing across the moon? Well, one of these 
came up just then and everything was in dark- 
ness, and Ann suddenly stopped and touched my 
arm. ‘Listen!’ she said. I tell you, it was un- 
canny. It — it made me feel all sort of cold.” 

“And you did listen?” 

“Of course.” 

“What did you hear?” 

Shaw evaded my eyes. “Well” — he hesitated 
— “there was a kind of wind came up that wasn’t 
there before, and, of course — ^you can imagine 
anything you want to, you know — that is ” 

He fumbled in his pockets for his cigarette- 
case. I tried to focus his attention. 

“And this — this wind ?” 

He failed miserably to find what he was search- 

63 


Wings of the Morning 

ing after. Suddenly he raised his head and 
looked at me with an odd, shrinking confusion in 
his eyes. 

‘‘It sounded,” he said, “like an aeroplane — far 
up — ^way above us.” 

For a moment I stared at him coldly; then I 
was in front of him, shaking him by his arm. 

“It won’t do, Shaw!” I commanded. “Won’t 
do at all! No, not even in times like these! 
We’re sensible men and can’t let ourselves believe 
such things even for a second. We — ^we can’t let 
ourselves go. No!” 

“We?” he asked dully. /‘Have you heard it, 
too?” 

His childlike sincerity broke the spell. I 
stepped back, ashamed of myself. “It makes no 
difference,” I said quietly, “what any one im- 
agines he has heard. You can hear all sorts of 
things when a wind is blowing. The point is, 
we’re supposed to be intelligent human beings. I 
don’t think there’s anything very mysterious, 
after all. On the contrary, it’s rather easily ex- 
plainable. We’ve all of us merely made the mis- 
take of assuming that Ann was not nearly as much 
in love with her husband as she was — and is; that 
she wasn’t capable of being very much in love 
with any one. Moreover, we doubted her im- 
64 


Wings of the Morning 

agination. It seems she has too much. Alastair 
Graham was killed in an airplane, you remember. 
If I were you, Td leave her alone. I wouldn’t be 
precipitous.” 

He shook his head. “Not once,” he said, “have 
I made one of the mistakes concerning Ann you 
refer to. And as for precipitous, good Lord!” 

And I dare say I would never have known 
more of the matter than I did at the moment 
had it not been for an accidental night that Ann 
and I spent on the top of a mountain divide, hud- 
dled in the lee of a fir-tree against the driving 
rain. It was not altogether an accidental night, 
for at the back of my brain had been the thought 
that possibly we might be caught out in some 
such fashion, although on the surface it seemed 
as if, by leaving the ranch early, we could easily 
get back by dusk. I was a game warden and had 
been notified to follow a party suspected of illegal 
killing — a party of youths, easily trailed and easily 
disciplined. So I asked Ann. Lately I had been 
losing none of the rare opportunities given me to 
talk to her. 

Evening found us still following tracks that led 
up a narrow, secret valley and then to the top of 
a great, wind-swept plateau. My quarry had 
moved from where I had thought to find it; but 
6S 


Wings of the Morning 

Ann seemed in no wise disturbed by my suggest- 
ing the possibility of a camp in the open. She 
resolutely insisted upon going forward. Mean- 
while, with dusk, a fine rain had come up, making 
it increasingly difiicult to find the horseshoe prints 
before us. We came to the yawning threat of a 
canyon on the far side of the plateau, and I 
stopped. I could see no farther. ‘"Here’s where 
we spend the night,” I announced. “Do you 
mind, Ann ?” 

She laughed in the darkness. “No,” she said. 

In the wet night we picketed our horses and 
found a huge, sheltering tree and an old log to 
start a fire with. Presently the leaping flames 
made a circle of light as secure as the walls of a 
house. I had some chocolate, a few raisins, the 
remains of our lunch. After we had eaten, I 
rolled Ann a cigarette. She sat in her favorite 
cross-legged position before the fire, smoking 
quietly. All around us was the gusty blackness 
filled with voices. I felt in something of the same 
mood as when Ann had handed me the Psalms, 
only a warmer mood, a more human one — ^Ann 
was very small. I began to get drowsy. I think 
I had closed my eyes when Ann stirred from her 
revery and spoke. “Death is a queer thing, 
isn’t it ?” she said. 


66 


Wings of the Morning 

I did not answer her, for I knew that she had 
only begun. 

^‘It’s a relaxing thing — it’s like that soft clean- 
ness that comes after a thunder-shower on a 
muggy July day. Everything seems so simple.” 

“How do you mean, Ann ?” I asked. 

“Well, take Alastair and myself. If we’d both 
gone on living I’d never have understood him 
better than I did a month after we were married. 
And, of course, my not understanding him would 
have made me all the time harder for him to 
understand, too. It isn’t very happy to love a 
person and feel so many barriers between him and 
yourself — all sorts of barriers of flesh and mind. 
But when a person dies that all seems to blow 
away, leaving the one beautiful thing you fell in 
love with but afterward never could exactly get 
hold of again. I suppose, you know, Alastair 
and I would have been like all the rest of my 
married friends.” 

“And Alastair, did he have that beautiful 
thing?” She had never before mentioned his 
name to me. 

She threw the end of her cigarette into the fire. 
“Of course,” she said. “All people who are 
loved have something beautiful about them, at 
first, anyway, haven’t they ? But Alastair had it 

67 


Wings of the Morning 

a great deal — oh, yes, under all his foolishness — 
for he was young and hadn’t been much hurt as 
yet. I’m sometimes glad, almost, he didn’t live 
so that I couldn’t hurt it any more. . . . It’s 
like a bird, isn’t it?” she said after a silence. 
“And when people are alive it’s always knocking 
against the walls of their hearts. Only after 
a while they’re afraid to listen to it, because they 
think most people don’t really like birds; when, 
as a matter of fact, every one else is in the same 
condition. It’s only when you’re dead that the 
bird flies out and up; glad, like a bird, to be free 
at last. Would you roll me another cigarette?” 

I made a bed for her out of my “slicker” and 
the dry side of the saddle-blankets. She fell 
asleep with the casualness of a child. 

I do not know when it was that my own un- 
easy slumbers were disturbed. The rain had 
ceased and the night had grown suddenly cold, 
with a myriad stars in an opaque sky, and, toward 
the north, one great incandescent spear of the 
aurora borealis reaching up to the zenith. With- 
out raising my head I was aware that Ann was 
awake. Then I made out her figure, a slim 
shadow standing by the embers of the dying fire. 
Something in her attitude held me silent; some- 
thing that was similar to the attitude in which I 
68 


Wings of the Morning 

had discovered her in the grove of aspen-trees. 
And as I watched she bent her head slowly back 
until she must have looked directly at the stars, 
and with her arms she made a gesture as if wel- 
coming to them something from the air above. 

It occurred to me that never before had I heard 
distant waterfalls so constant in their sound, so 
sibilant, so like the droning of a huge bee. . . . 

Looking back upon it now, it seems to me that 
all along I had been anticipating the mountain 
climb that Ann and Shaw and myself took a 
fortnight later. Looking back upon it, the climb 
seems as inevitable as the mountains themselves. 
Previously we had climbed a little, but only in 
the foot-hills; now Ann had set her heart upon a 
distant, snow-blanketed peak. ‘‘If we could only 
get up just part way !” she had said with the new, 
rather breathless enthusiasm that had recently 
been growing upon her. On a September day 
we set out. 

Our way at first led across the rolling expanse 
of sage-brush flats, then up through the heavy 
timber of the lower slopes, until, riding between 
tall pines, we came to small open meadows heavy 
with grass and sunlight. In one of these we tied 
our horses and, putting on our hobnailed boots, 
started up the bare shoulder of rock before us. 

69 


Wings of the Morning 

Ann climbed with the triumphant vigor of youth; 
Shaw with the dogged tenacity of his tempera- 
ment. Presently we stopped to rest. 

Below us dropped away the great encompassing 
belt of timber, and beyond this stretched the wide, 
silver-gray expanse of the valley cut through its 
centre by the sparkling silver of the river. To 
the north and east were distant hills, dark green, 
violet, brown, singularly clear in the soft air, 
while above us, like giant banners flung defiantly 
up into the blue, were the blue and white moun- 
tains. 

By noon we came to a little stream and had 
our lunch. We were getting up higher by now. 
The few trees left us were stunted and gnarled 
pines, bent by the winds and snows, and in place 
of the warm, crisp air of the forests was the dry, 
burnt smell of sun-scorched lichen and the keen, 
heady atmosphere of high altitudes. Every now 
and then these were cut across by the pungent 
aroma of small, late-blossoming flowers. 

Ann flung herself full length on the soft moss 
and stared up at the cloudless sky. ‘T had no 
idea of this,” she said drowsily. “No idea at 
all.” She sighed contentedly. For a while there 
was no sound except the gurgling of the little 
stream between its banks of broken stones. I 
70 



With her arms she made a gesture as if welcoming to them some- 
thing from the air above. 




Wings of the Morning 

looked over at Shaw; his head had fallen back; he 
was asleep. Ann sat up and watched him with a 
quizzical smile. ‘‘He does more than he should,” 
she said softly. “He is very brave.” 

“And you.?” I asked. “Aren’t you tired?” 

She shook her head. “I’m never tired,” she 
said, and clasped her knees with her hands and 
stared down into the valley. “Do you know 
what is the matter with the people who were 
brought up as I was,” she asked — “the people 
who all their lives are sunk, like I was, in a feather 
bed ? It’s because they never know until too 
late what it is to climb; never know what it is to 
hold on to something long after it seems one’s 
heart can stand it not a moment longer.” 

Shaw rolled over, opened an eye, and stared at 
us. “Hello!” he ejaculated. “Gracious! We 
ought to be going.” 

We climbed higher, into the receding blue. 

Mountains are lovelier by mid-afternoon, I 
think, than even by dawn or in the freshness of 
morning. The long lights fall across the canyons 
as quietly as sleep made visible. To one side of 
us the cliffs grew steeper, while above us a clump 
of ragged dwarf pine, our nearest objective, drew 
nearer. Looking at the others, I saw that they 
were possessed with the same elation of a purpose 

71 


Wings of the Morning 

almost accomplished as myself; and then, as is al- 
ways the case, the last few steps were as nothing, 
and, passing the fringe of twisted trees, we stood 
upon the rim of a little valley, green and still arid 
enchanted. In its bowl rested a tiny lake and 
beyond were the scarred sides of the final sum- 
mit. That was all; it was very breathless; none 
of us spoke. I turned to Ann. . . . 

I do not know how to describe what followed; 
I do not know how to give it the proper emotion, 
the proper emphasis. I am afraid if I tell it just 
as it occurred I will seem too sudden, too removed 
from what we choose to call the reality of life, 
and yet how can I tell it except as it occurred f 
And great heights are in themselves abrupt; have 
about them a quality of making the ordinary un- 
real, the extraordinary usual — a fine, thin, rare 
amplification of the outer edges of facts. For, as 
I turned to Ann, I saw her standing, her lips a 
little open, looking up at the dazzling arc of the 
sky, and suddenly she threw an arm up, as if to 
ward ofF a sight too blinding, and with a queer, 
soft, broken cry fell forward on her face. 

I leaped toward her, but Shaw was there before 
me, bending over her, the most curious twisted 
look on his mask-like face. ... I don’t know — 
it was all so unbelievable and yet so logical; I 
72 


Wings of the Morning 

had no sense of tragedy at the time; I have not 
been able, except by deliberate thought, to achieve 
a sense of tragedy since then. Often I blame my- 
self; and yet — tragedy is, in reality, only the 
sense of failure. How can consummation be 
that ? 

After a while I looked up to where Ann had 
made her gesture. In the wide empty spaces of 
the sky an eagle, so high it was merely a pin-point 
of shadow, floated on unconquered wings. 

Odd, wasn’t it, there should have been an eagle 
there just then ? 


73 



A CUP OF TEA 





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A CUP OF TEA 



OUNG Burnaby was late. He was always 


A late. One associated him with lateness and 
certain eager, impossible excuses — he was always 
coming from somewhere to somewheres, and his 
“train was delayed,” or his huge space-devouring 
motor “had broken down.” You imagined him, 
enveloped in dust and dusk, his face disguised 
beyond human semblance, tearing up and down 
the highways of the world; or else in the corridor 
of a train, biting his nails with poorly concealed 
impatience. As a matter of fact, when you saw 
him, he was beyond the average correctly attired, 
and his manner was suppressed, as if to conceal 
the keenness that glowed behind his dark eyes and 
kept the color mounting and receding in his sun- 
burnt cheeks. All of which, except the keenness, 
was a strange thing in a man who spent half his 
life shooting big game and exploring. But then, 
one imagined that Burnaby on the trail and 
Burnaby in a town were two entirely different 
persons. He liked his life with a thrust to it, 
and in a great city there are so many thrusts that, 
it is to be supposed, one of Burnaby’s tempera- 


77 


A Cup of Tea 

ment hardly has hours enough in a day to appre- 
ciate all of them and at the same time keep ap- 
pointments. 

On this February night, at all events, he was 
extremely late, even beyond his custom, and Mrs. 
Malcolm, having waited as long as she possibly 
could, sighed amusedly and told her man to an- 
nounce dinner. There were only three others 
besides herself in the drawing-room. Masters — 
Sir John Masters, the English financier — and his 
wife, and Mrs. Selden, dark, a little silent, with 
a flushed, finely cut face and a slightly sorrow- 
stricken mouth. And already these people had 
reached the point where talk is interesting. Peo- 
ple did in Mrs. Malcolm’s house. One went there 
with anticipation, and came away with the de- 
lightful, a little vague, exhilaration that follows 
an evening where the perfection of the material 
background — lights, food, wine, flowers — has been 
almost forgotten in the thrill of contact with real 
persons, a rare enough circumstance in a period 
when the dullest people entertain the most. In 
the presence of Mrs. Malcolm even the very great 
forgot the suspicions that grow with success and 
became themselves, and, having come once, came 
again vividly, overlooking other people who really 
had more right to their attentions than had she. 
78 


A Cup of Tea 

This was the case with Sir John Masters. And 
he was a very great man indeed, not only as the 
world goes but in himself: a short, heavy man, 
with a long, heavy head crowned with vibrant, 
still entirely dark hair and pointed by a black, 
carefully kept beard, above which arose — “arose’’ 
is the word, for Sir John’s face was architectural 
— a splendid, slightly curved nose — a buccaneer- 
ing nose; a nose that, willy-nilly, would have 
made its possessor famous. One suspected, far 
back in the yeoman strain, a hurried, possibly 
furtive marriage with gypsy or Jew; a sudden 
blossoming into lyricism on the part of a soil- 
stained Masters. Certainly from somewhere Sir 
John had inherited an imagination which was 
not insular. Dangerous men, these Sir Johns, 
with their hooked noses and their lyric eyes ! 

Mrs. Malcolm described him as fascinating. 
There was about him that sense of secret power 
that only politicians, usually meretriciously, and 
diplomats, and, above all, great bankers as a rule 
possess; yet he seldom talked of his own life, or 
the mission that had brought him to New York; 
instead, in his sonorous, slightly Hebraic voice, he 
drew other people on to talk about themselves, or 
else, to artists and writers and their sort, discov- 
ered an amazing, discouraging knowledge of the 
79 


A Cup of Tea 

trades by which they earned their living. ‘‘One 
feels,” said Mrs. Malcolm, “that one is eying a 
sensitive python. He uncoils beautifully.” 

They were seated at the round, candle-lit table, 
the rest of the room in partial shadow. Sir John 
looking like a lost Rembrandt, and his blonde 
wife, with her soft English face, like a rose-and- 
gray portrait by Reynolds, when Burnaby strode 
in upon them . . . strode in upon them, and 
then, as if remembering the repression he believed 
in, hesitated, and finally advanced quietly toward 
Mrs. Malcolm. One could smell the snowy Feb- 
ruary night still about him. 

“Tm so sorry,” he said. “I ” 

“You broke down, I suppose,” said Mrs. Mal- 
colm, “or the noon train from Washington was 
late for the first time in six years. What do you 
do in Washington, anyway? Moon about the 
Smithsonian ?” 

“No,” said Burnaby, as he sank into a chair 
and unfolded his napkin. “Y’see — ^well, that is 
— I ran across a fellow — an Englishman — who 
knew a chap I met last summer up on the Francis 
River — I didn’t exactly meet him, that is, I ran 
into him, and it wasn’t the Francis River really, 
it was the Upper Liara, a branch that comes in 
from the northwest. Strange, wasn’t it? — this 
8o 


A Cup of Tea 

fellow, this Englishman, got to talking about tea, 
and that reminded me of the whole thing.” He 
paused on the last word, and, with a peculiar 
habit that is much his own, stared across the table 
at Lady Masters, but over and through her, as if 
that pretty pink-and-white woman had entirely 
disappeared, and the warm shadows behind her, 
and in her place were no one could guess what 
vistas of tumbling rivers and barren tundras. 

“Tea!” ejaculated Mrs. Malcolm. 

Burnaby came back to the flower-scented circle 
of light. 

“Yes,” he said soberly, “tea. Exactly.” 

Mrs. Malcolm’s delicate eyebrows rose to a 
point. “What,” she asked, in the tones of de- 
lighted motherhood overlaid with a slight exas- 
peration which she habitually used toward Bur- 
naby, “has tea got to do with a man you met on 
the Upper Liara last summer and a man you met 
this afternoon ? Why tea ?” 

“A lot,” said Burnaby cryptically, and pro- 
ceeded to apply himself to his salad, for he had 
refused the courses his lateness had made him 
miss. “Y’see,” he said, after a moment’s reflec- 
tion, “it was this way — and it’s worth telling, for 
it’s queer. I ran into this Terhune this afternoon 
at a club — a big, blond Englishman who’s been in 

8i 


A Cup of Tea 

the army, but now is out making money. Owns 
a tea-house in London. Terhune & Terhune — 
perhaps you know them?” He turned to Sir 
John. 

“Yes, very well. I imagine this is Arthur 
Terhune.” 

“That’s the man. Well, his being in tea and 
that sort of thing got me to telling him about an 
adventure I had last summer, and, the first crack 
out of the box, he said he remembered the other 
chap perfectly — had known him fairly well at one 
time. Odd, wasn’t it, when you come to think 
of it? A big, blond, freshly bathed Englishman 
in a club, and that other man away up there !” 

“And the other man ? Is he in the tea business 
too ?” asked Mrs. Selden. She was interested by 
now, leaning across the table, her dark eyes 
catching light from the candles. It was some- 
thing — to interest Mrs. Selden. 

“No,” said Burnaby abruptly. “No. He’s in 
no business at all, except going to perdition. 
Y’see, he^s a squaw-man — a big, black squaw-man, 
with a nose like a Norman king’s. The sort of 
person you imagine in evening clothes in the 
Carleton lounge. He might have been anything 
but what he is.” 

“I wonder,” said Sir John, “why we do that 
82 


A Cup of Tea 

sort of thing so much more than other nations? 
Our very best, too. It’s odd.” 

“It was odd enough the way it happened to 
me, anyhow,” said Burnaby. “I’d been knock- 
ing around up there all summer, just an Indian 
and myself — around what they call Fort Francis 
and the Felly Lakes, and toward the end of Au- 
gust we came down the Liara in a canoe. We 
were headed for Lower Post on the Francis, and 
it was all very lovely until, one day, we ran into 
a rapid, a devil of a thing, and my Indian got 
drowned.” 

“How dreadful!” murmured Lady Masters. 

“It was,” agreed Burnaby; “but it might have 
been worse — for me, that is. It couldn’t have 
been much worse for the poor devil of an Indian, 
could it ? But I had a pretty fair idea of the 
country, and had only about fifty miles to walk, 
and a little waterproof box of grub turned up 
out of the wreck, so I wasn’t in any danger of 
starving. It was lonely, though — it’s lonely 
enough country, anyhow, and of course I couldn’t 
help thinking about that Indian and the way big 
rapids roar. I couldn’t sleep when night came — 
saw black rocks sticking up out of white water 
like the fangs of a mad dog. I was pretty near 
the horrors, I guess. So you can imagine I wasn’t 

83 


A Cup of Tea 

sorry when, about four o’clock of the next after- 
noon, I came back to the river again and a teepee 
standing up all by itself on a little pine-crowned 
bluff. In front of the teepee was an old squaw — 
she wasn’t very old, really, but you know how 
Indians get — boiling something over a fire in a 
big pot. 'How!’ I said, and she grunted. 'If 
you’ll lend me part of your fire. I’ll make some 
tea,’ I continued. 'And if you’re good. I’ll give 
you some when it’s done.’ Tea was one of the 
things cached in the little box that had been 
saved. She moved the pot to one side, so I judged 
she understood, and I trotted down to the river 
for water and set to work. As you can guess, I 
was pretty anxious for any kind of conversation 
by then, so after a while I said brightly: 'All 
alone?’ She grunted again and pointed over her 
shoulder to the teepee. 'Well, seeing you’re so 
interested,’ said I, 'and that the tea’s done, we’ll 
all go inside and ask your man to a party — if 
you’ll dig up two tin cups. I’ve got one of my 
own.’ She raised the flap of the teepee and I 
followed her. I could see she wasn’t a person 
who wasted words. Inside a little fire was 
smouldering, and seated with his back to us was a 
big, broad-shouldered buck, with a dark blanket 
wrapped around him. 'Your good wife,’ I began 
84 


A Cup of Tea 

cheerily — I was getting pretty darned sick of 
silence — 'has allowed me to make some tea over 
your fire. Have some? Fm ship-wrecked from 
a canoe and on my way to Lower Post. If you 
don’t understand what I say, it doesn’t make the 
slightest difference, but for God’s sake grunt — just 
once, to show you’re interested.’ He grunted. 
'Thanks!’ I said, and poured the tea into the 
three tin cups. The squaw handed one to her 
buck. Then I sat down. 

"There was nothing to be heard but the gur- 
gling of the river outside and the rather noisy 
breathing we three made as we drank; and then 
— very clearly, just as if we’d been sitting in an 
English drawing-room — in the silence a voice said: 
'By Jove, that’s the first decent cup of tea I’ve 
had in ten years!’ Yes, just that! 'By Jove, 
that’s the first decent cup of tea I’ve had in ten 
years!’ I looked at the buck, but he hadn’t 
moved, and then I looked at the squaw, and she 
was still squatting and sipping her tea, and then 
I said, very quietly, for I knew my nerves were 
still ragged, 'Did any one speak?’ and the buck 
turned slowly and looked me up and down, and I 
saw the nose I was talking about — the nose like a 
Norman king’s. I was rattled, I admit; I forgot 
my manners. 'You’re English!’ I gasped out; 

85 


A Cup of Tea 

and the buck said very sweetly: ‘That’s none of 
your damned business/” 

Burnaby paused and looked about the circle of 
attentive faces. “That’s all. But it’s enough, 
isn’t it ? To come out of nothing, going nowheres, 
and run into a dirty Indian who says: ‘By Jove, 
that’s the first decent cup of tea I’ve had in ten 
years!’ And then along comes this Terhune 
and says that he knows the man.” 

Mrs. Malcolm raised her chin from the hand 
that had been supporting it. “I don’t blame 
you,” she said, “for being late.” 

“And this man,” interrupted Sir John’s sono- 
rous voice, “this squaw-man, did he tell you any- 
thing about himself?” 

Burnaby shook his head. “Not likely,” he 
answered. “I tried to draw him out, but he 
wasn’t drawable. Finally he said: ‘If you’ll shut 
your damned mouth I’ll give you two dirty blan- 
kets to sleep on. If you won’t I’ll kick you out 
of here.’ The next morning I pulled out, leaving 
him crouched over the little teepee fire nursing 
his knees. But I hadn’t gone twenty yards when 
he came to the flap and called out after me: ‘I 
say!’ I turned about sullenly. His dirty face 
had a queer, cracked smile on it. ‘Look here! 
Do you — ^where did you get that tea from, any- 
86 



“‘You’re English!’ I gasped out; and the buck said very sweetly: 
‘That’s none of your damned business.’” 




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A Cup of Tea 

way ? I — there’s a lot of skins I’ve got; I don’t 
suppose you’d care to trade, would you ?’ I took 
the tea out of the air-tight box and put it on the 
ground. Then I set olF down river. Henderson, 
the factor at Lower Post, told me a little about 
him: his name — it wasn’t assumed, it seems; and 
that he’d been in the country about fifteen years, 
going from bad to worse. He was certainly at 
‘worse’ when I saw him.” Burnaby paused and 
stared across the table again with his curious, 
far-away look. “Beastly, isn’t it?” he said, as 
if to himself. “Cold up there now, too ! The 
snow must be deep.” He came back to the pres- 
ent. “And I suppose, you know,” he said, smil- 
ing deprecatingly at Mrs. Selden, “he’s just as 
fond of flowers and lights and things as we are.” 

Mrs. Selden shivered. 

“Fonder!” said Sir John. “Probably fonder. 
That sort is. It’s the poets of the world who 
can’t write poetry who go to smash that way. 
They ought to take a term at business, and” — 
he reflected — “the business men, of course, at 
poetry.” He regarded Burnaby with his inscru- 
table eyes, in the depths of which danced little 
flecks of light. 

“What did you say this man’s name was?” 
asked Lady Masters, in her soft voice. She had 

87 




A Cup of Tea 

an extraordinary way of advancing, with a timid 
rush, as it were, into the foreground, and then 
receding again, melting back into the shadows. 
She rarely ever spoke without a sensation of 
astonishment making itself felt. ‘‘She is like a 
mist,” thought Mrs. Malcolm. 

“Bewsher,” said Burnaby — “Geoffrey Boisse- 
lier Bewsher. Quite a name, isn’t it ? He was 
in the cavalry. His family are rather swells in 
an old-fashioned way. He is the fifth son — or 
seventh, or whatever it is — of a baronet and, Ter- 
hune says, was very much in evidence about Lon- 
don twenty-odd years ago. Terhune used to See 
him in clubs, and every now and then dining out. 
Although he himself, of course, was a much 
younger man. Very handsome he was, too, Ter- 
hune said, and a favorite. And then one day he 
just disappeared — got out — no one knows exactly 
why. Terhune doesn’t. Lost his money, or a 
woman, or something like that. The usual thing, 
I suppose. I — You didn’t hurt yourself, did 
you .?...” 

He had paused abruptly and was looking across 
the table; for there had been a little tinkle and a 
crash of breaking glass, and now a pool of cham- 
pagne was forming beside Lady Masters’s plate, 
and finding its way in a thin thread of gold along 
88 



A Cup of Tea 

the cloth. There was a moment’s silence, and 
then she advanced again out of the shadows with 
her curious soft rush. “How clumsy I am !” she 
murmured. “My arm — My bracelet! I — I’m 
so sorry!” She looked swiftly about her, and 
then at Burnaby. “Oh, no! I’m not cut, 
thanks!” Her eyes held a pained embarrass- 
ment. He caught the look, and her eyelids flick- 
ered and fell before his gaze, and then, as the 
footman repaired the damage, she sank back once 
more into the half-light beyond the radiance of 
the candles. “How shy she is!” thought Bur- 
naby. “So many of these English women are so 
queer. She’s an important woman in her own 
right, too.” He studied her furtively. 

Into the soft silence came Sir John’s carefully 
modulated voice. “Barbara and I,” he explained, 
‘'will feel this very much. We both knew Bew- 
sher.” His eyes became sombre. “This is very 
distressing,” he said abruptly. 

“By Jove!” ejaculated Burnaby, and raised his 
head like an alert hound. 

“How odd it all is!” said Mrs. Malcolm. But 
she was wondering why men are so queer with 
their wives — resent so much the slightest social 
clumsiness on their part, while in other women — 
provided the offense is not too great — it merely 
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amuses them. Even the guarded manners of Sir 
John had been disturbed. For a moment he had 
been very angry with the shadow that bore his 
name; one could tell by the swift glance he had 
cast in her direction. After all, upsetting a glass 
of champagne was a very natural sequel to a 
story such as Burnaby had told, a story about a 
former acquaintance — perhaps friend. 

Sir John thoughtfully helped himself to a spoon- 
ful of his dessert before he looked up; when he 
did so he laid down his spoon and sat back in his 
chair with the manner of a man who has made a 
sudden decision. “No,” he said, and an unex- 
pected little smile hovered about his lips, “it 
isn’t so odd. Bewsher was rather a figure of a 
man twenty years ago. Shall I tell you his his- 
tory?” 

To Mrs. Malcolm, watching with alert, humor- 
ous eyes, there came a curious impression, faint 
but distinct, as wind touching her hair; as if, that 
is, a door into the room had opened and shut. 
She leaned forward, supporting her chin in her 
hand. 

“Of course,” she said. 

Sir John twisted between his fingers the stem 
of his champagne-glass and studied thoughtfully 
the motes of light at the heart of the amber wine. 

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‘‘You see,” he began thoughtfully, “it’s such a 
difficult story to tell — difficult because it took 
twenty-five — and, now that Mr. Burnaby has 
furnished the sequel, forty-five years — to live; and 
difficult because it is largely a matter of psychol- 
ogy. I can only give you the high lights, as it 
were. You must fill in the rest for yourselves. 
You must imagine, that is, Bewsher and this 
other fellow — this Morton. I can’t give you his 
real name — it is too important; you would know 
it. No, it isn’t obviously dramatic. And yet” — 
his voice suddenly became vibrant — “such things 
compose, as a matter of fact, the real drama of 
the world. It — ” he looked about the table 
swiftly and leaned forward, and then, as if inter- 
rupting himself, “but what was obviously dra- 
matic,” he said — and the little dancing sparks in 
the depths of his eyes were peculiarly noticeable 
— “was the way I, of all people, heard it. Yes. 
You see, I heard it at a dinner-party like this, in 
London; and Morton — the man himself — told the 
story.” He paused, and with half-closed eyes 
studied the effect of his announcement. 

“You mean — ?” asked Burnaby. 

“Exactly.” Sir John spoke with a certain cool 
eagerness. “He sat up before all those people 
and told the inner secrets of his life; and of them 
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all I was the only one who suspected the truth. 
Of course, he was comparatively safe, none of 
them knew him well except myself, but think of 
it! The bravado — the audacity! Rather mag- 
nificent, wasn’t it He sank back once more in 
his chair. 

Mrs. Malcolm agreed. ‘‘Yes,” she said. “Mag- 
nificent and insulting.” 

Sir John smiled. “My dear lady,” he asked, 
“doesn’t life consist largely of insults from the 
strong to the weak ?” 

“And were all these people so weak, then ?” 

“No, in their own way they were fairly impor- 
tant, I suppose, but compared to Morton they 
were weak — very weak — Ah, yes ! I like this 
custom of smoking at table. Thanks!” He se- 
lected a cigarette deliberately, and stooped toward 
the proffered match. The flame illumined the 
swarthy curve of his beard and the heavy lines 
of his dark face. “You see,” he began, straight- 
ening up in his chair, “the whole thing — that 
part of it, and the part I’m to tell — is really, if 
you choose, an allegory of strength, of strength 
and weakness. On the one side Morton — there’s 
strength, sheer, undiluted power, the thing that 
runs the world; and on the other Bewsher, the 
ordinary man, with all his mixed-up ideas of right 
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A Cup of Tea 

and wrong and the impossible, confused thing he 
calls a ‘code’ — Bewsher, and later on the girl. 
She too is part of the allegory. She represents — 
what shall I say? A composite portrait of the 
ordinary young woman ? Religion, I suppose. 
Worldly religion. The religion of most of my 
good friends in England. A vague but none the 
less passionate belief in a heaven populated by 
ladies and gentlemen who dine out with a God 
who resembles royalty. And coupled with this 
religion the girl had, of course, as have most of 
her class, a very distinct sense of her own impor- 
tance in the world; not that exactly — personally 
she was over-modest; a sense rather of her impor- 
tance as a unit of an important family, and a deep- 
rooted conviction of the fundamental necessity of 
unimportant things: parties, and class-worship, 
and the whole jumbled-up order as it is. The 
usual young woman, that is, if you lay aside her 
unusual beauty. And, you see, people like Bew- 
sher and the girl haven’t much chance against a 
man like Morton, have they ? Do you remember 
the girl, my dear?” he asked, turning to his wife. 

‘‘ Yes,” murmured Lady Masters. 

“Well, then,” continued Sir John, “you must 
imagine this Morton, an ugly little boy of twelve, 
going up on a scholarship to a great public school 
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A Cup of Tea 

— a rather bitter little boy, without any particular 
prospects ahead of him except those his scholar- 
ship held out; and back of him a poor, stunted 
life, with a mother in it — a sad, dehumanized 
creature, I gathered, who subsisted on the bounty 
of a niggardly brother. And this, you can under- 
stand, was the first thing that made Morton hate 
virtue devoid of strength. His mother, he told 
me, was the best woman he had ever known. 
The world had beaten her unmercifully. His 
earliest recollection was hearing her cry at night. 
. . . And there, at the school, he had his first 
glimpse of the great world that up to then he 
had only dimly suspected. Dramatic enough in 
itself, isn’t it ? — if you can visualize the little dark 
chap. A common enough drama, too, the Lord 
knows. We people on top are bequeathing misery 
to our posterity when we let the Mortons of the 
world hate the rich. And head and shoulders 
above the other boys of his age at the school was 
Bewsher; not that materially, of course, there 
weren’t others more important; Bewsher ’s family 
was old and rich as such families go, but he was 
very much a younger son, and his people lived 
mostly in the country; yet even then there was 
something about him — a manner, an adeptness in 
sports, an unsought popularity, that picked him 
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A Cup of Tea 

out; the beginnings of that Norman nose that Mr. 
Burnaby has mentioned. And here” — Sir John 
paused and puffed thoughtfully at his cigarette — 
‘‘is the first high light. 

“To begin with, of course, Morton hated Bew- 
sher and all he represented, hated him in a way 
that only a boy of his nature can; and then, one 
day — I don’t know exactly when it could have 
been, probably a year or two after he had gone 
up to school — he began to see quite clearly what 
this hate meant; began to see that for such as he 
to hate the Bewshers of the world was the sheer- 
est folly — a luxury far beyond his means. Quaint, 
wasn’t it ? In a boy of his age ! You can imag- 
ine him working it out at night, in his narrow 
dormitory bed, when the other boys were asleep. 
You see, he realized, dimly at first, clearly at last, 
that through Bewsher and his kind lay the hope 
of Morton and his kind. Nice little boys think 
the same thing, only they are trained not to admit 
it. That was the first big moment of Morton’s 
life, and with the determination characteristic of 
him he set out to accomplish what he had decided. 
In England we make our future through our 
friends, in this country you make it through your 
enemies. But it wasn’t easy for Morton; such 
tasks never are. He had a good many insults to 
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A Cup of Tea 

swallow. In the end, however, from being toler- 
ated he came to be indispensable, and from being 
indispensable eventually to be liked. He had 
planned his campaign with care. Carefulness, 
recklessly carried out, has been, I think, the guid- 
ing rule of his life. He had modelled himself on 
Bewsher; he walked like Bewsher; tried to think 
like Bewsher — that is, in the less important things 
of life — and, with the divination that marks his 
type of man, the little money he had, the little 
money that as a schoolboy he could borrow, he 
had spent with precision on clothes and other 
things that brought him personal distinction; in 
what people call necessities he starved himself. 
By the time he was ready to leave school you 
could hardly have told him from the man he had 
set out to follow: he was equally well-mannered; 
equally at his ease; if anything, more conscious of 
prerogative than Bewsher. He had come to 
spend most of his holidays at Bewsher’s great old 
house in Gloucestershire. That, too, was an illu- 
mination. It showed him what money was made 
for — the sunny quiet of the place, the wheels of a 
spacious living that ran so smoothly, the long 
gardens, the inevitableness of it all. Some day, 
he told himself, he would have just such a house. 
He has. It is his mistress. The world has not 
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A Cup of Tea 

allowed him much of the poetry that, as you must 
already see, the man has in him; he takes it out 
on his place. 

‘^It was in Morton’s last year at Oxford, just 
before his graduation, that the second great mo- 
ment of his life occurred. He had done well at 
his college, not a poor college either; and all the 
while, you must remember, he was borrowing 
money and running up bills. But this didn’t 
bother him. He was perfectly assured in his own 
mind concerning his future. He had counted 
costs. In that May, Bewsher, who from school 
had gone to Sandhurst, came up on a visit with 
two or three other fledgling officers, and they had 
a dinner in Morton’s rooms. It turned into rather 
a ‘rag,’ as those things do, and it was there, 
across a flower-strewn, wine-stained table, that 
Morton had his second revelation. He wasn’t 
drunk — he never got drunk; the others were. 
The thing came in upon him slowly, warmingly, 
like the breeze that stirred the curtains. He felt 
himself, as never before, a man. You can see 
him sitting back in his chair, in the smoke and 
the noise and the foolish singing, cool, his eyes a 
little closed. He knew now that he had passed 
the level of these men; yes, even the shining mark 
Bewsher had set. He had gone on, while they 
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A Cup of Tea 

had stood still. To him, he suddenly realized, 
and to such as he, belonged the heritage of the 
years, not to these men who thought they held 
it. These old gray buildings stretching away 
into the May dusk, the history of a thousand 
years, were his. These sprawled young aristo- 
crats before him — they, whether they eventually 
came to know it or not, they and Bewsher with 
them — ^would one day do his bidding: come when 
he beckoned, go when he sent. It was a big 
thought, wasn’t it, for a man of twenty-two.?” 
Sir John paused and puffed at his cigarette. 

“That was the second high light,” he continued, 
“and the third did not come until fifteen years 
later. Bewsher went into the Indian army — his 
family had ideas of service — and Morton into a 
banking-house in London. And there, as delib- 
erately as he had taken them up, he laid aside 
for the time being all the social perquisites which 
he had with so much pains acquired. Do you 
know — he told me that for fifteen years not once 
had he dined out, except when he thought his 
ambitions would be furthered by so doing, and 
then, as one turns on a tap, he turned on the 
charm he now knew himself to possess. It is not 
astonishing, is it, when you come to think of it, 
that eventually he became rich and famous ? 

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Most people are unwilling to sacrifice their youth 
to their future. He wasn’t. But it wasn’t a 
happy time. He hated it. He paid off his 
debts, however, and at the end of the fifteen 
years found himself a big man in a small way, 
with every prospect of becoming a big man 
in a big way. Then, of course — such men do — 
he began to look about him. He wanted wider 
horizons, he wanted luxury, he wanted a wife; 
and he wanted them as a starved man wants 
food. He experienced comparatively little diffi- 
culty in getting started. Some of his school and 
university friends remembered him, and there was 
a whisper about that he was a man that bore 
watching. But afterward he stuck. The inner 
citadel of London is by no means as assailable as 
the outer fortifications lead one to suppose. 

“They say a man never has a desire but there’s 
an angel or a devil to write it down. Morton 
had hardly made his discovery when Bewsher 
turned up from India, transferred to a crack cav- 
alry regiment; a sunburnt, cordial Bewsher, dev- 
ilishly determined to enjoy the fulness of his 
prime. On his skirts, as he had done once be- 
fore, Morton penetrated farther and farther into 
the esoteric heart of society. I’m not sure just 
how Bewsher felt toward Morton at the time; he 
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A Cup of Tea 

liked him, I think; at all events, he had the habit 
of him. As for Morton, he liked Bewsher as 
much as he dared; he never permitted himself to 
like any one too much. 

don’t know how it is with you, but I have 
noticed again and again that intimate friends are 
prone to fall in love with the same woman: per- 
haps it is because they have so many tastes in 
common; perhaps it is jealousy — I don’t know. 
Anyhow, that is what happened to these two, 
Morton first, then Bewsher; and it is characteris- 
tic that the former mentioned it to no one, while 
the latter was confidential and expansive. Such 
men do not deserve women, and yet they are often 
the very men women fall most in love with. At 
first the girl had been attracted to Morton, it 
seems; he intrigued her — no doubt the sense of 
power about him; but the handsomer man, when 
he entered the running, speedily drew ahead. 
You can imagine the effect of this upon her earlier 
suitor. It was the first rebuff that for a long time 
had occurred to him in his ordered plan of life. 
He resented it and turned it over in his mind, 
and eventually, as it always does to men of his 
kind, his opportunity came. You see, unlike 
Bewsher and his class, all his days had been an 
exercise in the recognition and appreciation of 
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A Cup of Tea 

chances. He isolated the inevitable fly in the 
ointment, and in this particular ointment the 
fly happened to be Bewsher’s lack of money and 
the education the girl had received. She was 
poor in the way that only the daughter of a great 
house can be. To Morton, once he was aware of 
the fly, and once he had combined the knowledge 
of it with what these two people most lacked, it 
was a simple thing. They lacked, as you have 
already guessed, courage and directness. On 
Morton’s side was all the dunderheadism of an 
aristocracy, all its romanticism, all its gross ma- 
terialism, all its confusion of ideals. But you 
mustn’t think that he, Morton, was cold or ob- 
jective in all this: far from it; he was desperately 
in love with the girl himself, and he was playing 
his game like a man in a corner — all his wits 
about him, but fever in his heart. 

‘‘There was the situation, an old one — a girl 
who dare not marry a poor man, and a poor man 
cracking his brains to know where to get money 
from. I dare say Bewsher never questioned the 
rightness of it all — he was too much in love with 
the girl, his own training had been too similar. 
And Morton, hovering on the outskirts, talked — 
to weak people the most fatal doctrine in the 
world — the doctrine of power, the doctrine that 

lOI 


A Cup of Tea 

each man and woman can have just what they 
want if they will only get out and seek it. That’s 
true for the big people; for the small it usually 
spells death. They falter on methods. They are 
too afraid of unimportant details. His insistence 
had its results even more speedily than he had 
hoped. Before long the girl, too, was urging 
Bewsher on to effort. It isn’t the first time good- 
ness has sent weakness to the devil. Meanwhile 
the instigator dropped from his one-time position 
of tentative lover to that of adviser in particular. 
It was just the position that at the time he most 
desired. 

‘‘Things came to a head on a warm night in 
April. Bewsher dropped in upon Morton in his 
chambers. Very handsome he looked, too, I dare 
say, in his evening clothes, with an opera-coat 
thrown back from his shoulders. I remember 
well myself his grand air, with a touch of cavalry 
swagger about it. I’ve no doubt he leaned against 
the chimneypiece and tapped his leg with his 
stick. And the upshot of it was that he wanted 
money. ‘Oh, no ! not a loan. It wasn’t as bad 
as that. He had enough to screw along with 
himself; although he was frightfully in debt. He 
wanted a big sum. An income. To make money, 
that was. He didn’t want to go into business if 
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A Cup of Tea 

he could help it; hadn’t any ability that way; 
hated it. But perhaps Morton could put him in 
the way of something ? He didn’t mind chances.’ 

‘‘Do you see.^” Sir John leaned forward. 
“And he never realized the vulgarity of it — that 
product of five centuries, that English gentleman. 
Never realized the vulgarity of demanding of life 
something for nothing; of asking from a man as a 
free gift what that man had sweated for and 
starved for all his life; yes, literally, all his life. 
It was an illumination, as Morton said, upon that 
pitiful thing we call ‘class.’ He demanded all 
this as his right, too; demanded power, the one 
precious possession. Well, the other man had 
his code as well, and the first paragraph in it was 
that a man shall get only what he works for. 
Can you imagine him, the little ugly man, sitting 
at his table and thinking all this ? And suddenly 
he got to his feet. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ll make you 
a rich man.’ But he didn’t say he would keep 
him one. That was the third high light — the 
little man standing where all through the ages 
had stood men like him, the secret movers of the 
world, while before them, supplicating, had passed 
the beauty and the pride of their times. In the 
end they all beg at the feet of power — the kings 
and the fighting men. And yet, although this 
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was the great, hidden triumph of his life, and, 
moreover, beyond his hopes a realization of the 
game he had been playing — for it put Bewsher, 
you see, utterly in his power — Morton said at 
the moment it made him a little sick. It was too 
crude; Bewsher’s request too unashamed; it made 
suddenly too cheap, since men could ask for it so 
lightly, all the stakes for which he, Morton, had 
sacrificed the slow minutes and hours of his life. 
And then, of course, there was this as well: Bew- 
sher had been to Morton an ideal, and ideals can’t 
die, even the memory of them, without some 
pain.” 

Mrs. Malcolm, watching with lips a little 
parted, said to herself: ‘‘He has uncoiled too 
much.” 

“Yes” — Sir John reached out his hand and, 
picking up a long-stemmed rose from the table, 
began idly to twist it in his fingers. “And that 
was the end. From then on the matter was sim- 
ple. It was like a duel between a trained swords- 
man and a novice; only it wasn’t really a duel at 
all, for one of the antagonists was unaware that 
he was fighting. I suppose that most people 
would call it unfair. I have wondered. And yet 
Bewsher, in a polo game, or in the game of social 
life, would not have hesitated to use all the skill 
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A Cup of Tea 

and craft he knew. But, you say, he would not 
have played against beginners. Well, he had 
asked himself into this game; he had not been 
invited. And so, all through that spring and into 
the summer and autumn the three-cornered con- 
test went on, and into the winter and on to the 
spring beyond. Unwittingly, the girl was play- 
ing more surely than ever into Morton’s hand. 
The increasing number of Bewsher’s platitudes 
about wealth, about keeping up tradition, about 
religion, showed that. He even talked vaguely 
about giving up the army and going into business. 
‘It must have its fascinations, you know,’ he re- 
marked lightly. In the eyes of both of them 
Morton had become a sort of fairy godfather — a 
mysterious, wonderful gnome at whose beck gold 
leaped from the mountainside. It was just the 
illusion he wished to create. In the final analysis 
the figure of the gnome is the most beloved figure 
in the rotten class to which we belong. 

“And then, just as spontaneously as it had 
come, Bewsher’s money began to melt away — 
slowly at first; faster afterward until, finally, he 
was back again to his original income. This was 
a time of stress, of hurried consultations, of sym- 
pathy on the part of Morton, of some rather ugly 
funk on the part of Bewsher; and Morton realized 

105 


A Cup of Tea 

that in the eyes of the girl he was rapidly becom- 
ing once more the dominant figure. It didn’t do 
him much good” — Sir John broke the stem of the 
rose between his fingers. 

‘‘Soon there was an end to it all. There came, 
finally, a very unpleasant evening. This, too, was 
in April; April a year after Bewsher’s visit to 
Morton’s chambers, only this time the scene was 
laid in an office. Bewsher had put a check on 
the desk. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘that will tide me over 
until I can get on my feet,’ and his voice was 
curiously thick; and Morton, looking down, had 
seen that the signature wasn’t genuine — a clumsy 
business done by a clumsy man — and, despite all 
his training, from what he said, a little cold shiver 
had run up and down his back. This had gone 
farther than he had planned. But he made no 
remark, simply pocketed the check, and the next 
day settled out of his own pockets Bewsher’s 
sorry affairs; put him back, that is, where he had 
started, with a small income mortgaged beyond 
hope. Then he sent a note to the girl requesting 
an interview on urgent business. She saw him 
that night in her drawing-room. She was very 
lovely. Morton was all friendly sympathy. It 
wasn’t altogether unreal, either. I think, from 
what he told me, he was genuinely touched. But 
io6 


A Cup of Tea 

he felt, you know — the urge, the goad, of his own 
career. His kind does. Ultimately they are not 
their own masters. He showed the girl the check 
— not at first, you understand, but delicately, 
after preliminary discussion; reluctantly, upon 
repeated urging. ‘What was he to do.?^ What 
would she advise ? Bewsher was safe, of course; 
he had seen to that; but the whole unintelligible, 
shocking aspect of the thing !’ He tore the check 
up and threw it in the fire. He was not unaware 
that the girl’s eyes admired him. It was a warm 
night. He said good-by, and walked home along 
the deserted street. He remembered, he told me, 
how sweet the trees smelled. He was not happy. 
You see, Bewsher had been the nearest approach 
to a friend he had ever had. 

“That practically finished the sordid business. 
What the girl said to Bewsher Morton never 
knew; he trusted to her conventionalized religion 
and her family pride to break Bewsher’s heart, 
and to Bewsher’s sentimentality to eliminate him 
forever from the scene. In both surmises he was 
correct; he was only not aware that at the same 
time the girl had broken her own heart. He 
found that out afterward. And Bewsher elimi- 
nated himself more thoroughly than necessary. I 
suppose the shame of the thing was to him like a 
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A Cup of Tea 

blow to a thoroughbred, instead of an incentive, 
as it would have been to a man of coarser fibre. 
He went from bad to worse, resigned from his 
regiment, finally disappeared. Personally, I had 
hoped that he had begun again somewhere on the 
outskirts of the world. But he isn’t that sort. 
There’s not much of the Norman king to him ex- 
cept his nose. The girl married Morton. He 
gave her no time to recover from her gratitude. 
He felt very happy, he told me, the day of his 
wedding, very elated. It was one of those rare 
occasions when he felt that the world was a good 
place. Another high light, you see. And it was 
no mean thing, if you consider it, for a man such 
as he to marry the daughter of a peer, and at the 
same time to love her. He was not a gentleman, 
you understand, he could never be that — it was 
the one secret thing that always hurt him — no 
amount of brains, no amount of courage could 
make him what he wasn’t; he never lied to him- 
self as most men do; so he had acquired a habit of 
secretly triumphing over those who possessed the 
gift. The other thing that hurt him was when, a 
few months later, he discovered that his wife still 
loved Bewsher and always would. And that” — 
Sir John picked up the broken rose again — ‘‘is, I 
suppose, the end of the story.” 

io8 


A Cup of Tea 

There was a moment’s silence and then Bur- 
naby lifted his pointed chin. ‘‘By George!” he 
said, “it is interesting to know how things really 
happen, isn’t it ? But I think — ^you have, haven’t 
you, left out the real point ? Do you — ^would 
you mind telling just why you imagine Morton 
did this thing? Told his secret before all those 
people ? It wasn’t like him, was it ?” 

Sir John slowly lighted another cigarette, and 
then he turned to Burnaby and smiled. “Yes,” 
he said, “it was extremely like him. Still, it’s 
very clever of you, very clever. Can’t you guess ? 
It isn’t so very difficult.” 

“No,” said Burnaby, “I can’t guess at all.” 

“Well, then, listen.” And to Mrs. Malcolm it 
seemed as if Sir John had grown larger, had merged 
in the shadows about him; at least he gave that 
impression, for he sat up very straight and threw 
back his shoulders. For a moment he hesitated, 
then he began. “You must go back to the din- 
ner I was describing,” he said — “the dinner in 
London. I, too, was intrigued as you are, and 
when it was over I followed Morton out and 
walked with him toward his club. And, like you, 
I asked the question. I think that he had known 
all along that I suspected; at all events, it is char- 
acteristic of the man that he did not try to bluff 
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A Cup of Tea 

me. He walked on for a little while in silence, 
and then he laughed abruptly. ‘Yes,’ he said, 
‘I’ll tell you. Yes. Just this. What there is to 
be got, I’ve got; what work can win I’ve won; but 
back of it all there’s something else, and back 
even of that there’s a careless god who gives his 
gifts where they are least deserved. That’s one 
reason why I talked as I did to-night. To all of 
us — the men like me — there comes in the end a 
time when we realize that what a man can do we 
can do, but that love, the touch of other people’s 
minds, these two things are the gifts of the care- 
less god. And it irritates us, I suppose, irritates 
us ! We want them in a way that the ordinary 
man who has them cannot understand. We want 
them as damned souls in hell want water. And 
sometimes the strain’s too much. It was to- 
night. To touch other minds, even for a moment, 
even if they hate you while you are doing it, that’s 
the thing! To lay yourself, just once, bare to 
the gaze of ordinary people! With the hope, 
perhaps, that even then they may still find in you 
something to admire or love. Self-revelation ! 
Every man ' confesses some time. It happened 
that I chose a dinner-party. Do you under- 
stand?’” It was almost as if Sir John himself 
had asked the question. 

no 


A Cup of Tea 

‘‘And then’’ — he was speaking in his usual 
calm tones again — “there happened a curious 
thing, a very curious thing, for Morton stopped 
and turned toward me and began to laugh. I 
thought he would never stop. It was rather un- 
canny, under the street-lamp there, this usually 
rather quiet man. ‘And that,’ he said at length, 
‘that’s only half the story. The cream of it is 
this : the way I myself felt, sitting there among all 
those soft, easily lived people. That’s the cream 
of it. To flout them, to sting them, to laugh at 
them, to know you had more courage than all of 
them put together, you who were once so afraid 
of them ! To feel that — even if they knew it was 
about yourself you were talking — that even then 
they were afraid of you, and would to-morrow 
ask you back again to their houses. That’s 
power ! That’s worth doing ! After all, you can 
keep your love and your sympathy and your gen- 
tlemen; it’s only to men like me, men who’ve 
sweated and come up, that moments arise such as 
I’ve had to-night.’ And then, ‘It’s rather a 
pity,’ he said, after a pause, ‘that of them all you 
alone knew of whom I was talking. Rather a pity, 
isn’t it.?’” Sir John hesitated and looked about 
the table. “It was unusual, wasn’t it.?” he said 
at length gently. “Have I been too dramatic.?” 

Ill 


A Cup of Tea 

In the little silence that followed, Mrs. Mal- 
colm leaned forward, her eyes starry. ‘‘I would 
rather,” she said, ‘‘talk to Bewsher in his teepee 
than talk to Morton with all his money.” 

Sir John looked at her and smiled — his charm- 
ing smile. “Oh, no, you wouldn’t,” he said. 
“Oh, no! We say those things, but we don’t 
mean them. If you sat next to Morton at din- 
ner you’d like him; but as for Bewsher you’d de- 
spise him, as all right-minded women despise a 
failure. Oh, no; you’d prefer Morton.” 

“Perhaps you’re right,” sighed Mrs. Malcolm; 
“pirates are fascinating, I suppose.” She arose 
to her feet. Out of the shadows Lady Masters 
advanced to meet her. “She is like a mist,” 
thought Mrs. Malcolm. “Exactly like a rather 
faint mist.” 

Burnaby leaned over and lit a cigarette at one 
of the candles. “And, of course,” he said quietly, 
without raising his head, “the curious thing is 
that this fellow Morton, despite all his talk of 
power, in the end is merely a ghost of Bewsher, 
after all, isn’t he?” 

Sir John turned and looked at the bowed sleek 
head with a puzzled expression. “A ghost!” he 
murmured. “I don’t think I quite understand.” 

“It’s very simple,” said Burnaby, and raised 

II2 


A Cup of Tea 

his head. “Despite all Morton has done, in the 
things worth while, in the things he wants the 
most, he can at best be only a shadow of the 
shadow Bewsher has left — a shadow of a man to 
the woman who loves Bewsher, a shadow of a 
friend to the men who liked Bewsher, a shadow 
of a gentleman to the gentlemen about him. A 
ghost, in other words. It’s the inevitable end of 
all selfishness. I think Bewsher has rather the 
best of it, don’t you 

“I — I had never thought of it in quite that 
light,” said Sir John, and followed Mrs. Mal- 
colm. 

They went into the drawing-room beyond — 
across a hallway, and up a half-flight of stairs, 
and through glass doors. “Play for us!” said 
Mrs. Malcolm, and Burnaby, that remarkable 
young man, sat down to the piano and for per- 
haps an hour made the chords sob to a strange 
music, mostly his own. 

“That’s Bewsher!” he said when he was 
through, and had sat back on his stool, and was 
sipping a long-neglected cordial. 

“B-r-r-r!” shivered Mrs. Selden from her place 
by the fire. “How unpleasant you are !” 

Sir John looked troubled. “I hope,” he said, 
“my story hasn’t depressed you too much. Bur- 
ns 


A Cup of Tea 

naby’s was really worse, you know. Well, I must 
be going.” He turned to Mrs. Malcolm. “You 
are one of the few women who can make me sit 
up late.” 

He bade each in turn good night in his suave, 
charming, slightly Hebraic manner. To Burnaby 
he said: “Thank you for the music. Improvisa- 
tion is perhaps the happiest of gifts.” 

But Burnaby for once was awkward. He was 
watching Sir John’s face with the curious, intent 
look of a forest animal that so often possessed his 
long, dark eyes. Suddenly he remembered him- 
self. “Oh, yes,” he said hastily. “I beg your 
pardon. Thanks, very much.” 

“Good night!” Sir John and Lady Masters 
passed through the glass doors. 

Burnaby paused a moment where he had 
shaken hands, and then, with the long stride 
characteristic of him, went to the window, and, 
drawing aside the curtain, peered into the dark- 
ness beyond. He stood listening until the purr 
of a great motor rose and died on the snow-muf- 
fled air. “He’s gone,” he said, and turned back 
into the room. He spread his arms out and 
dropped them to his sides. “Swastika !” he said. 
“And God keep us from the evil eye!” 

“What do you mean asked Mrs. Malcolm. 

114 


A Cup of Tea 

‘‘Sir John,” said Burnaby. ‘‘He has ‘a bad 
heart.’” 

“Stop talking your Indian talk and tell us 
what you mean.” 

Burnaby balanced himself on the hearth. “Am 
I to understand you don’t know.?” he asked. 
“Well, Morton’s Masters, and ‘the girl’s’ Lady 
Masters, and Bewsher — ^well, he’s just a squaw- 
man.” 

“I don’t believe it !” said Mrs. Malcolm. “He 
wouldn’t dare.” 

“Wouldn’t dare?” Burnaby laughed shortly. 
“My dear Minna, he’d dare anything if it gave 
him a sense of power.” 

“But why — ^why did he choose us ? We’re not 
so important as all that?” 

“Because — ^well, Bewsher’s name came up. 
Because, well, you heard what he said — self-reve- 
lation — men who had sweated. Because” — sud- 
denly Burnaby took a step forward and his jaw 
shot out — “because that shadow of his, that wife 
of his, broke a champagne-glass when I said Geof- 
frey Boisselier Bewsher; broke her champagne- 
glass and. I’ve no doubt, cried out loud in her 
heart. Power can’t buy love — no; but power can 
stamp to death anything that won’t love it. 
That’s Masters. I can tell a timber-wolf far off. 

115 


A Cup of Tea 

Can you see him now in his motor ? He’ll have 
turned the lights out, and she — his wife — will be 
looking out of the window at the snow ? All you 
can see of him would be his nose and his beard 
and the glow of his cigar — except his smile. You 
could see that when the car passed a corner lamp, 
couldn’t you ?” 

don’t believe it yet,” said Mrs. Malcolm. 
*Ht’s too preposterous.” 


ii6 




CLOSED DOORS 


% 


4 




\ 









CLOSED DOORS 


H ardy toW the story of “the wolf” because 
Mrs. Roland in her clever, carefully put 
together voice had settled once more the ancient 
question of right and wrong. Black was black, 
you see, and white was white. The luckless couple 
she had been describing might — but they were 
very fortunate if they got it — expect sympathy 
possibly, but certainly not condonation. People 
were free agents. Nowadays we were inclining 
much too much to overlook attacks upon the 
social order. Our moral fibre was slackening. 
One made his or her own bed, and — ^well, that 
was all right, provided afterward there was entire 
willingness to lie in it. No kicking, you under- 
stand; nor any expectation of intelligent people 
being infinitely forgiving. And there you are! 
Exactly ! There you are. 

There had been about this a little fierceness, a 
little overinsistency. One looks for it when clever 
women annunciate the simplicity of the moral 
code. They know better. One has always a 
sense of an attempt at self-conviction. 

In the shadows of the background Callender 
119 


Closed Doors 


Stirred uneasily. ‘^Oh, of course,” he interjected 
in his thick, tired voice; ‘‘of course ! It’s all true 
— perfectly; what you’ve been saying; but — ” 
He trailed off into confusion. “Damn these 
double beds, anyhow! There’re too many of 
em. 

Then Hardy leaned forward. I had known 
that he would lean forward. There are times 
when Hardy is bound to lean forward. Under his 
calm, spare, brown exterior he nurses passions, 
and perhaps the most fierce of them all is a hatred 
for the average judgment of the world. 

“It’s a wonder to me,” he said, “how well peo- 
ple get on under the circumstances. We’re all 
of us living in a world much too big and complex 
for the best of us. We’re like peas shaken in a 
giant hopper; and we don’t know why we’re 
shaken.” He paused and lit a cigarette. Behind 
the orange flame of the match you had a sudden 
glimpse of lean, firm-textured cheek and gray, 
narrow eyes. Then there was darkness again. 
For a moment no one spoke, and Hardy asked 
abruptly: “Do any of you happen to remember 
John Murray and Eloise Foster — ^Alec Foster’s 
wife.?” 

About the question was a curious whip-lash 
quality, and you realized immediately that al- 
120 


Closed Doors 


though you did not know John Murray and 
Eloise Foster — had never heard of them, in fact 
— some of the others did; remembered them, that 
is, poignantly, for there fell another silence — this 
time a silence in which you suddenly became 
acutely aware of your surroundings; of the white 
shirt-fronts of the men, forming, in the soft dark- 
ness, a circle of etiolation like century-plants in 
the dusk of a garden; of the firefly ends of ciga- 
rettes and cigars. Far away to the south a hang- 
ing of gold across the sky indicated the city; and 
in the valley below the lights of a suburb twin- 
kled through the trees. Pressing in upon the 
vine-covered porch was the smell of July, sweet 
and heavy; and the continuous, strident chirrup- 
ing of insects seemed for a moment to monopolize 
all sound. It was as if instantaneously a picture 
of John Murray and Eloise Foster had been 
flashed upon a screen — one was so vividly aware 
of their presence in the minds of some of those 
listening to Hardy. 

Callender broke the spell. He stirred uneasily. 
You heard his rattan chair creaking under his 
heavy body. He made a curious sound with his 
lips. ‘^Good Lord, yes!” he murmured. 

‘‘I saw them a year ago,” said Hardy. 

‘‘You did! Where?” 

I2I 


Closed Doors 


“In Wyoming.” 

From his dark corner Roland spoke precisely. 
His words sounded like dollars being counted. “Is 
that that fellow, that painter, that ran away 
with Alec Foster’s wife about fifteen years ago?” 
he asked. 

Hardy answered with equal grimness. “Yes,” 
he said, “it was that fellow Murray — that 
painter.” His lighted cigarette described a cir- 
cle in the darkness, and I realized that he had 
made the peculiar gesture with which, as a rule, 
he precedes narration — rare narration, for he is 
not much given to story-telling — a gesture as if 
out of the air he was gathering together memory 
with his fingers. 

“You remember John Murray in New York, 
don’t you, Helen?” he began. “I do, especially, 
because, perhaps you recollect, I knew him inti- 
mately; as intimately, that is, as any one knew 
him. He happened to be the one bright spot in 
the dreary five years of oflice work that followed 
my graduation from college. You see, I was at 
the age when I hungered for color and didn’t 
know how to go about getting it. Most young 
men are that way. Then I met Murray. It was 
at a reception given by a distant cousin of mine. 
I can see him now, standing before an open fire- 
122 


Closed Doors 


place, balancing a cup of tea in one hand and 
talking with extreme dexterity to three women at 
once, and I am perfectly sure that each one of 
them thought he was wishing the other two were 
not there. He had to a supreme degree the pecu- 
liar gift of complimenting by his manner even 
the dullest person to whom he talked.’’ Hardy 
interrupted himself. ‘‘You remember that trait, 
don’t you?” he asked. 

Mrs. Roland answered. “Yes,” she said. 

“It was an odd trait,” continued Hardy 
thoughtfully, “when you consider what Murray 
really was; he was, you see, in reality the most 
impersonal man I have ever known. I put this 
down at first to the aloofness of genius, but after- 
ward — ^well, you will understand. At all events, 
he made no such impression upon me that after- 
noon. I realized only the apparent, and to me 
unaccustomed, interest he took in my personality 
and the charm of the man’s face and figure: his 
tall, lithe figure; his black, close-cropped, curly 
hair; his black, amused eyes. It wasn’t until 
much later that I perceived the faun-like quality 
other people complained of; the curious, darting 
elusiveness. And, of course, I refused to believe 
it long after I knew it was true. He was — I wish 
I could make him clear to you — so oddly not-to- 
123 


Closed Doors 


be-pinned-down to anything; so oddly obstinate 
about refusing to live up to expectations; in the 
end, so cold about life. There were dozens of 
little outward signs. His fingers were always 
limp, I remember, although he shook hands so 
eagerly. And there was about him the queerest 
kind of a blurred quality. At a distance, you 
understand, he seemed clean-cut, extremely so, 
but as you came closer there grew a mistiness, a 
mobile lack of precision, that eventually made 
you aware only of the eyes I have mentioned: 
amused, and quick, and black, with little wine- 
color lights in them. And yet in countless ways 
he was so sweet and kind and humorous. 

‘‘I remember that first afternoon an incident 
which at the time made little impression upon 
me, but which, in the light of subsequent knowl- 
edge, was sinister. There was a small blonde 
girl talking to Murray when I went back to where 
he was, and she moved away, but not before I 
had noticed an unmistakable look in her eyes. 
As for Murray, he was bored. He took no great 
pains to conceal it.” 

Hardy paused long enough to throw away his 
cigarette. “Of course,” he resumed in a dry 
voice, “I am not contending that every time a 
man has the misfortune to be the object of an 
124 


Closed Doors 


unreciprocated passion It Is his duty to propose 
marriage. That Victorian Ideal, I believe, has 
gone out of fashion. But there’s a difference. I 
don’t think we’ve yet reached the point where 
such things can be done for amusement, or to 
gratify a taste for amateur psychology. And 
Murray, I am afraid, rather enjoyed illumina- 
tions. He was a lighter of bonfires he had no 
intention of tending. He was something like a 
cold, sweet wind — if the figure is not too exag- 
gerated — blowing tinder into flame. 

“All these things were not clear to me at once, 
you understand; they came to me gradually, after 
I had known Murray some time. And with them 
came another sense of disturbance, all very con- 
fused — a haunting discomfiture. Briefly, Mur- 
ray should have been on his way to being a great 
painter; briefly, he wasn’t. There was no use 
blinking the fact. Even my ignorant and loyal 
eyes told me that. But what was holding him 
back? Admitting all he had against him — too 
much money, too much love of gayety, too large 
a flock of adoring women — there was still no ade- 
quate reason that I could find. It wasn’t until 
the end of those five years that I laid my finger 
on the scar; then it was laid for me by Hewitt — 
Hewitt, who was old and wise, and who, occasion- 
125 


Closed Doors 


ally, painted a beautiful thing. ‘The fault lies 
in the boy’s character,’ he spluttered. ‘How the 
devil can you paint a portrait when you can’t get 
inside, and don’t want to get inside, your sub- 
ject’s mind ? When you don’t know what get- 
ting inside a mind is .? Sense of beauty ? Oh, 
yes, he’s got a marvellous sense of beauty; but 
you can’t even paint a great landscape unless you 
have a perception of humanity. In the end, as 
in everything else, you’ve got to know the taste 
of blood and smell of sweat. I’m talking about 
great stuff, not even fairly good stuff; and, mark 
my words, the former is the only kind young 
Murray will ever be satisfied to paint. If he 
doesn’t come through he’ll kill himself. I know 
him. And how the deuce can he come through ?’ 

“That was at luncheon at a club, and I recol- 
lect how depressed I was. It was a snowy Feb- 
ruary day, and after Hewitt had gone I went to 
one of the windows and peered down into the 
muddy desolation of the street. I knew that 
what he had said was true. Here, after all my 
twistings and turnings, I was face to face with a 
fact. None the less, late that afternoon I went 
up to Murray’s studio. By that time my mind 
was a little bit more at peace; at all events, I found 
myself needing desperately Murray’s laugh, his 
126 


Closed Doors 


quick, amused eyes, the warm beauty of his 
rooms, the reassuring smell of paint. It was a 
coincidence, wasn’t it, that I should have met 
Eloise Foster there that very day ? 

shan’t forget it. The room was dark when 
I came in, but a lamp was burning on a table 
beside a screen, over which had been flung a gor- 
geous vestment of cloth of gold. Standing before 
the screen was Eloise Foster. At first she terri- 
fied me a little, she was so bright and arresting. 
I wasn’t used to women. A tall, slim, coming- 
toward-you sort of person she was, with boyish 
bronze hair parted at one side and smiling lips. I 
delighted in her laugh and her gestures. But I 
must confess this first impression suffered a slight 
reaction when later on we sat down to tea. It 
was rather like meeting the mystery of a lantern 
at night, and then, immediately afterward, hear- 
ing the matter-of-fact voice behind it. At that 
time I am sure — I am very sure — Eloise Foster 
was rather an ordinary sort of woman. Indeed, 
I am not at all sure she isn’t a very ordinary sort 
of woman to-day. Perhaps that’s the thing about 
her — she is so ordinary as to be exceptional. We 
don’t grow ordinary women any more. Primitive 
impulses are carefully restrained. It isn’t the 
fashion to act like bursting dams; emotions are 
127 


Closed Doors 


run into strongly banked irrigation ditches. And 
Eloise Foster, you see, did give one the impres- 
sion of a dam — a well-groomed dam. But that 
first afternoon the conversation was more than 
normal — it was subnormal, as most ‘smart’ con- 
versation is. At that time the Fosters lived at 
Long Slip, and the talk was almost entirely about 
the inner life of that spiritual community. 

“That was in February, and during the winter 
I met Mrs. Foster several times at Murray’s, but 
it was not until a certain night in spring that I 
ever talked to her alone. We had had tea, and I 
walked with her through the growing night to 
the house of a friend with whom she was staying. 
It was a very fragrant night; we didn’t say much 
until we had gone a block or two, then she turned 
to me abruptly. 

“‘You’re a great friend of John Murray’s, aren’t 
you?’ she asked. 

“I assured her I was. 

“‘Does he ever worry you ?’ 

“My heart gave a little jump, but I pretended 
not to understand what she meant. 

“‘He seems to me,’ she said — ‘he seems to me 
rather like a man dying standing up — inch by 
inch.’ 

“I was astonished. I had never before sus- 
128 


Closed Doors 


pected this typical product of Long Slip of any 
seriousness or any capability of feeling. She had 
seemed to me merely the most attractive addition 
to Murray’s adulatory dove-cote. Her next 
speech had the curious logical disconnectedness 
of the direct feminine mind. 

wish,’ she said, a little breathlessly, H wish 
he would fall in love with some one — forget him- 
self. But he can’t. That’s his trouble. He 
ought to be such a great man. If he could only 
lay his hands on something!’ 

‘‘We came to the house where she was staying 
and went up the steps. As the door was opened 
she turned and smiled at me — a very radiant, 
proudly beautiful sort of person. I wasn’t to see 
her again for fourteen years. Within two weeks 
she and Murray ran away together.” 

In the silence that followed Callender again 
made the odd little whispering sound with his lips. 

“Yes,” said Hardy, out of the darkness, “you 
remember her too, don’t you ?” 

He lit another cigarette. “Do any of you by 
any chance know central southern Wyoming?” 
he asked. “Well, it’s a good deal of a desert — 
yellow and red buttes and stunted cactus; all of it 
under a sky of piercing blueness. Every now 
and then there’s a water-hole, or a valley opening 
129 


Closed Doors 


up unexpectedly out of the dead monotony. A 
year ago last August I dropped into one of these 
— one of these valleys. It was dusk. I had been 
five days coming from Idaho. I was all alone — 
just a couple of pack-horses. At a God-forsaken 
little town fifteen miles back they had told me 
there was a ranch ahead of me where I could 
spend the night. And then, here it was. The 
road dipped suddenly and twisted through a 
sand-bank, and at the end of the twist I found 
myself looking down into a bowl of green fields 
through which ran a shining river. As I looked, 
a yellow light broke out from a clump of cotton- 
woods, and then another, and I traced between 
the foliage the outline of a long, low ranch-house. 
The smell of dampness and the smell of grass 
came up to meet me. It was like wine. My 
mouth was dry with alkali. The country through 
which I had come had been even more desolate 
than usual, for there had been a drought; no 
rain for a month. The dust was ankle-deep 
on a horse. The road followed down another 
bench. At the bottom I found a gate; then 
some corrals, to one side of which were out- 
buildings and saddle-sheds. As I led my horses 
toward the latter a woman came out of a near-by 
cabin — a woman dressed in white — and started 
130 


Closed Doors 

toward the main ranch-house. She did not see 
me at all, but, at the sound of my voice, turned, 
hesitated, and came toward me. She walked very 
slowly. One had the impression of a picture 
slowly emerging from the black and gray of a 
negative. When she was within a foot or two of 
me she stopped. She was the quietest, slowest- 
moving woman I had seen in a long time. You 
notice gestures, mental or physical, with extraor- 
dinary quickness and accuracy in a lonely coun- 
try. The woman was Eloise Foster.’’ 

Hardy fell silent for a moment, and then again 
described the curious circle with the end of his 
lighted cigarette — the circle as if he was gathering 
with his fingers memory out of the air. ‘^One 
gets used to coincidence after a while,” he pro- 
ceeded. ‘‘One comes to the conclusion that life 
is almost entirely a matter of coincidence. Aston- 
ishment is replaced by an attitude toward fate of 
‘I told you so.’ At the back of my brain I had 
always thought that somewhere, some day, I 
should again see John Murray and the woman he 
had run away with. I had even imagined that I 
might meet them under some such circumstances as 
I did. There were rumors of their being West. But 
I was not prepared for Eloise Foster’s first words: 

“‘Oh !’ she said. ‘So it’s you !’ 


Closed Doors 


‘^Wasn’t it odd? Nothing else: no word of 
greeting, no laugh. Nor did we speak while I 
was taking my saddles ofF and turning my horses 
in to pasture. Afterward I walked beside her to 
the house. 

‘‘We came to a grove of trees, and a courtyard 
and a well; beyond, silhouetted against a sky of 
deep yellow, was the outline of a large T-shaped 
log house. A window or two was lighted. We 
were facing the end of the T. 

“Then, for the first time since her opening 
words, my companion spoke again. She looked 
at the sky. ‘Another hot day to-morrow,’ she 
said. ‘It’s bad. The river is shrinking to noth- 
ing.’ Perhaps my nerves were beginning to be 
already a little on edge, but the remark seemed 
to me to have about it portentousness, more por- 
tentousness than even the usual remark of a per- 
son close to the soil and the weather. I was be- 
ginning to look and listen; this was a strange 
place to which I had come and my old acquain- 
tance had turned into a strange woman. 

“We pushed open a door. It opened into a 
long passageway that ran straight through the 
house. To one side was a square frame hung 
with a heavy curtain. Eloise lifted this and I 
found myself in a great log living-room. It was 
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astonishingly beautiful. On the floor were heavy 
rugs, and the walls, ruddy wine-colored in places 
where the light from a couple of lamps struck 
them, were hung with skins. Here and there 
were even a few landscapes, framed in a dark 
wood to suit the background. One was aware of 
luxury and careful living. My hostess made a 
gesture toward a great, high-backed bench before 
the empty fireplace. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ll 
tell John.’ I heard her go. For a minute I was 
alone in the mellow quiet of the room; then there 
was a step, and a voice said — it was Murray’s 
voice, but with a note in it I had never before 
heard — a high, whining note, an apologetic note, 
a note that suddenly made me sit very still — ‘If 
you don’t mind I don’t think I’ll go in to supper, 
Eloise. I’m awfully tired. I — ’ and it trailed 
off into silence as the curtain stirred, and I heard 
the swish of Eloise’s skirt. 

“Her answer was as strange as the curious ap- 
peal. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you will — you will go in 
to supper,’ and her words had a precise, com- 
manding quality. ‘Besides, here’s an old friend 
of ours, Mr. Hardy.’ 

“‘Who?’ asked Murray. 

“ ‘Hardy ! Jim Hardy ! ’ 

“I had the topsyturvy impression of being be- 
133 


Closed Doors 


hind the scenes of a play. I got up from my 
bench. Standing near a lamp was Murray. For 
a moment he hesitated vaguely and then came 
toward me, and I cannot tell you with what relief 
I saw flash to the surface the same ready smile, 
the old darting quickness, I remembered so well. 
It was as if some aura of evil had been dispelled. 
And in a flash of intuition the truth of the situa- 
tion — ^what I thought was the truth — came to me. 
Of course, a woman of Eloise Foster’s training — 
or lack of training — ^was unhappy stripped of all 
the things that seemed to her worth while. I 
pitied Murray; I patted his shoulder affection- 
ately; I looked him over closely. He was very 
thin, and he stooped, and his hair, much too long, 
was streaked with gray, and his face, under its 
sunburn, was haggard; but at least he was human 
and hospitable, and the woman beside him had 
been neither of these things. 

“I went to my room to wash — it opened on the 
long hall and was, like the living-room, surpris- 
ingly beautiful and luxurious — resenting Eloise 
Foster, and I went in to supper with my resent- 
ment growing upon me. Supper proved no par- 
ticularly agreeable meal. Eloise and Murray at- 
tempted an interest in New York — in people they 
had not seen in years — but the interest was evi- 
dently not very acute. The conversation lan- 

134 


Closed Doors 


guished. I experienced the feeling of disappoint- 
ment that usually follows the seeing of old friends 
after a long lapse of time. There were six or 
seven others at table: ranch-hands, and an older 
man who was evidently a foreman. I noticed 
they treated Murray with the kindly contempt 
Westerners show toward those for whose opinion 
they have little respect. There was talk in brief 
sentences of sheep; of the drought; the older man 
was ominous. It seemed there was ‘no water in 
the moon.’ He inferred calamity if the river 
went dry. One of the younger men was more 
optimistic. ‘The river never had gone dry.’ 
‘Had he noticed how all the fish were gathering 
in a few pools .? No ? Well, that meant some- 
thing. A fellow from the Lazy Z outfit over in 
the sand-hills claimed to have seen a mad coyote 
— hydrophobia.’ The optimist offered to fight 
any coyote, mad or otherwise, with bare hands. 
I remember the other’s words. ‘Smart!’ he said 
grimly. ‘A smart young fellow I And never left 
the country either! Wonderful, I calls it.’ He 
fixed a baleful eye on the offender. ‘Son,’ he 
said, ‘don’t you go fightin’ no mad coyotes; I seen 
them in Texas in the ’eighties. They ain’t got 
enough sense left to run — Jes’ plumb full o’ 
hell and courage.’ 

“In the silence that followed you noticed the 

135 


Closed Doors 


wind, the wind that had been blowing with fitful 
steadiness for over a week. It poured into the 
room in hot, arid gusts. I hate wind. Most 
people — cow-punchers, sailors — ^who see much of 
wind dislike it. It is bad for the nerves; it is al- 
ways prophetic. I had lived with this wind ever 
since I had left Idaho; at night it was peculiarly 
noticeable, and back of its coming and going 
was an odd sense of persistency. You felt that it 
had no end. One of the men stirred irritably. 
‘Damn!’ he muttered, and got up and closed the 
windows. The room became stifling. And then, 
suddenly — quite suddenly and unexpectedly — I 
saw something that left me wondering — I saw 
Murray’s face. 

“He had been silent a long while. He was sit- 
ting at the end of the table, his hands below the 
surface of the boards, but he had left the room. 
Do you see what I mean ? The principal part of 
him was gone. There was a rigid, fairly polite 
body upright in his chair, but John Murray was 
somewhere else. And above the body was a 
mask with no trace of human designing about it; 
just a long, brown oval, with two burnt-out coals 
where eyes should have been. 

“We don’t believe such things, do we ?” Hardy 
puffed at his cigarette. “We insist upon reaffirm- 
136 






And then, suddenly, I saw something that left me wondering — 
I saw Murray’s face.” 





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Closed Doors 

ing that life is matter of fact, when, of course, we 
all know it isn’t. I insisted upon it at the mo- 
ment. I questioned my senses. Then I looked 
up again — ^what I had seen was true. I looked 
about the table; every one was eating placidly — 
every one, that is, but Eloise Foster; she was star- 
ing straight ahead of her, an expression on her 
face as if she was listening for a sound just be- 
yond the reach of her ear. As for myself, I 
couldn’t eat any more. In a little while we went 
into the living-room — Eloise, Murray, the fore- 
man, and myself. The younger men, with evi- 
dent relief, left for mysterious back-buildings. I 
found myself adjusting my first impressions. 
Here was something more than merely a woman 
weary of a bad bargain; than merely a man un- 
happy because the woman he loved was unsatis- 
fied. I was very tired. I excused myself and 
went to my charmingly incongruous room. All 
night the wind whined about the house; I heard it 
every time I awoke. A queer, oppressive sense 
of mystery overwhelmed me like a vague, un- 
pleasant dream. 

‘‘The next morning, of course, everything was 
different. It always is. The sun came up huge 
and hot, but for a little while, before its full rays 
struck the earth, there was coolness and the smell 

137 


Closed Doors 


of grass and early mist. Breakfast, too, proved 
a pleasant meal. Even the old foreman was smil- 
ing in a silent way. I decided that I was getting 
old; that long journeys tired me more than I 
was aware. I was entirely restored to the com- 
monplace. I felt a little silly about the night 
before.” 

Hardy paused. “I wish,” he resumed, “I had 
followed my inclination and plan and had left the 
following morning. Had I done so I would have 
saved myself much emotion, and after one has 
knocked about the world a good deal one becomes 
a trifle weary of vicarious emotion. But I didn’t 
leave. I couldn’t. I told Eloise — Eloise Murray, 
for by this time I knew she and Murray had been 
married — of my intention that night. We were 
standing on the porch after supper. There was a 
round, hot moon risen over the skeleton whiteness 
of the benches to the east, and I could see my 
companion’s face clearly. For a second she 
seemed lost in thought, and then, with a quick, 
fluttering gesture, she came toward me and put 
her hand on my arm. The dropping of her mask 
was as queer as the wearing of it. ‘Don’t go!’ 
she whispered. Her lips twisted. ‘Don’t go!’ 
she repeated. ‘You see’ — her voice broke in an 
odd little laugh — ‘you’re the first human thing 

138 


closed Doors 


Fve known — IVe seen for years’; and she turned 
and fled into the house. 

‘‘I walked across a field to the little river. It 
lay in shining pools beneath the burning moon — 
languid, with no motion left to it. Pretty soon 
the wind would begin again — it had dropped for 
for an hour or two at sundown. My feeling of 
matter-of-factness had left me entirely. 

“I won’t go into the next three weeks. You 
must imagine for yourselves how the thing grew 
upon me — how the impression of unnaturalness, 
of secrets being whispered about me, finally took 
possession of me, until, in the end, I became as 
much a part of the drama as the principal actors 
themselves. It is necessary to have been isolated 
for a period with just a few people to grasp the 
psychology of this. I found myself on edge — lis- 
tening for hints; spending my time trying to piece 
these hints into a logical whole. Save for that 
one break in her calm, Eloise Murray had never 
dropped her mask; save for stated and very obvi- 
ous attempts to play the host, Murray was largely 
unaware of my existence. I was coming to the 
conclusion that here were two people playing at a 
game between themselves: a desperate game — at 
least, so it seemed to me in my more overwrought 
moments. And all the while I was watching this 

139 


Closed Doors 

moral malady another malady was coming upon 
us, a malady much more definite — I mean the 
drought. I had forgotten its presence; it made 
itself finally visible like a great ghost with creak- 
ing, dust-colored wings. 

‘‘Have you ever seen drought — real drought?’* 
Hardy’s voice took on a sudden rasping intona- 
tion. “Well, it’s what you think God would do 
to the whole world if ever he should lose his in- 
fallible sense of humor. It’s thirst personified, 
weariness made into your shadow. It follows you 
all day, and goes to bed with you at night, and 
gets up with you in the morning. Out of the 
desert came Mexicans with bands of sheep; the 
water-holes were gone. The ranch became a place 
of bawling animals, of incredible dust and stench; 
the little river, dwindling day by day, grew foul 
and green, and the banks down to it were broken 
by countless hoofs. At first it was like the rush 
backward of a fleeing population before an ad- 
vancing army; there was much action, much plan- 
ning, much talk of expedients; and then this fell 
away into the dour, hopeless silence with which 
men take the sardonicism of the universe. We 
sat down prepared to see this devil of wind and 
dust and heat out. In the end humanity is even 
more persistent than nature. 

140 


Closed Doors 


“For a few days Murray seemed stirred from 
the queer trance in which he lived, but only for a 
few days; it was his wife who surprised me. She 
met the drought head up. It was she who took 
charge, who was everywhere superintending, who 
kept the men in hand when some of the less hardy 
wanted to flee down the valley toward the dis- 
tant railway. I achieved for her a new respect, 
a respect that began to have in it some touch of 
old affection. She was a curious woman; I failed 
to understand her. Oddly enough — I had not 
seen it before — I suddenly found her beautiful. 
Not the beauty of fifteen years back, but a new 
beauty — a hard, spare, translucent beauty — the 
beauty a woman gets when she learns some of 
the distasteful lessons a man learns while he is 
still very young; the beauty of a sword. And 
then — quite by chance — I found out what was 
back of all this mystery; what was back of the 
masks that Murray and his wife wore. It was 
very simple. 

“One afternoon I came in just before dusk from 
the corrals; I was tired and wanted to wash off 
some of the yellow dust that I had been drinking 
for the past three weeks. My hair and eyes and 
ears seemed irritatingly full of it. The doors at 
either end of the long passageway that ran through 
141 


Closed Doors 


the house were open and the burning air of out- 
side stirred in and out in portentous breaths. 
My room was opposite one that I knew Murray 
used as a study, although I had never been inside 
it. As I came in I noticed that the door of this 
room was slightly ajar. As I passed I suddenly 
heard again the high, whining voice, the voice 
with the apologetic, inhuman note in it I had 
heard the night of my arrival. I paused instantly. 
Perhaps I shouldn’t have done so, but there are 
times, you know, when you do. ‘Good God!’ 
said the voice. ‘Good God, yes! What do you 
think I am ? What do you think I am made 
of?’ Then there was silence, and then again the 
high, wailing voice. ‘For God’s sake,’ it said, 
‘go away ! Get out of here !’ and the door opened 
and Eloise Murray came out. She was walking 
very rigidly, her head thrown back, two spots of 
color in her cheeks; her eyes were blank. I think 
she hardly noticed me, although as she went by 
her sleeve touched mine. But I had had a glimpse 
into the room; bending over a table was Murray, 
and he was pressing something into his bared 
arm.” 

Hardy paused. “Oh, yes,” he said to the un- 
spoken question, “it was drugs. I should have 
known before. I am very stupid about such 
142 


Closed Doors 


things. I observe closely, but often my conclu- 
sions are dull. I am always surprised, for in- 
stance, when people tell me that women, whose 
complexions I think beautiful, paint. I never 
guess. Yes, it was drugs. Stupid, wasn’t it ? 
All that brain full of beauty; all that talent! 
And here I’d been thinking the usual gross inac- 
curacies about a woman ruining a man or a man 
ruining a woman. 

‘‘That night I spoke to Eloise about what I 
had seen. We were again on the porch, only this 
time under a sky of stars drooping from a roof 
of candent purple. You see, the drought had 
brought us close together, although we had actu- 
ally talked to each other very little. She listened 
in silence to my suggestions — stupid suggestions. 
I’ve no doubt — the suggestions of the average 
man: change of scene, doctors, sanatoriums. 
Then she spread out her arms. ‘Do you sup- 
pose,’ she said, ‘that I’ve done none of these 
things ? What is the end ? Oh, dear God, what 
is the end ? You’ve never known a thing of this 
kind, have you ? It is the elusiveness of it; the 
intangibility. If there was only something one 
could take hold of! But there isn’t. Not a 
thing. Listen! Once, just after we ran away, 
one of the few times he has ever spoken openly 

143 


Closed Doors 


to me, John gave me a hint of this. I am not 
quite sure he was taking anything then; I am not 
quite sure when he began; but I remember that 
he spread his arms out as I am doing now. ‘‘If 
I could only grasp life!” he said. “If I could 
only get my head down to where my hands are, 
or raise my hands up to my head 1 If I could 
only feel just the human things and not merely 
the things that have been raised to a supreme 
degree!” And then he began talking about the 
immaterialism of sin. “Strangle it!” he said. 
“If a man could only strangle it! Those old 
saints who could fling an ink-pot at the devil were 
lucky.” He laughed as he said it, and I laughed 
too. I didn’t understand then; I was very happy; 
I thought I was going to make him a great man. 
But now I do — I understand, utterly.’ She 
paused. ‘And yet,’ she continued, ‘I am not 
sorry. No, I am not sorry. No woman is ever 
sorry for having been made awake.’ She shook 
her head, and I saw she had reached the point 
where people can no longer speak. . . . Within 
the week the wolf came down out of the desert.” 

“The what?” asked Mrs. Roland sharply. 
Far off* in the valley a train whistled twice; the 
night suddenly pressed in upon us again. 

“The wolf,” said Hardy casually. “A gaunt, 
144 


Closed Doors 

mangy wolf, grayish-yellow like the country he 
had left. He came down one afternoon when I 
was smoking a cigarette in the shade of a saddle- 
house. There were two or three sheep-herders 
sprawled out beside me. Our conversation, as 
you can imagine, had been desultory. It was too 
piercingly hot to talk. It was a good deal of an 
effort even to lie on the ground. I happened to 
look up, and there, coming down a narrow trail 
that had been worn by the horses, was something 
that looked like a slowly moving bundle of sage- 
brush. It didn’t interest me very much at first, 
but I called my companions’ attention to it. ‘A 
coyote,’ I said lazily. One of the men was a 
Mexican and he studied the oncoming object care- 
fully; I saw his eyes widen. ‘Wolf!’ he said sud- 
denly. We continued to watch without excite- 
ment. It didn’t seem to occur to any of us that, 
of all preposterous things in the world, nothing 
was more preposterous than the idea of a wolf 
trotting down a trail in full sight of men at four 
o’clock of an afternoon. There was a dip in the 
ground, and for a moment the gray bundle was 
lost to view, but almost immediately it appeared 
again, unhurried, undeviating, preoccupied. We 
gazed at it with calmly speculative eyes. Do 
you know — I think we were all a little crazy that 
145 


Closed Doors 


last week of the drought ? The trail from the 
lowest bench, past the corrals, was within ten 
feet of us, and before we knew it the thing was 
amongst us; no, not amongst us, but alongside of 
us; for it never turned its head as it went past. 
You felt that you could almost smell its breath. 
As it ran, a slobber of foam streaked its jaws and 
fell in a little fine spray on the dust. There was 
a horse tied to a hitching-rack; it gave a sudden 
snort, kicked, and backed into the creature at its 
heels. Almost without turning the wolf sank its 
teeth deep into the nearest fetlock, shook its head, 
and went on. I noticed then that all the horses 
in the corrals were fighting and squealing. The 
bitten horse screamed, and for the first time the 
monstrosity of the whole thing came home to us 
— the monstrous quiet, the monstrous lack of 
fear of this creature out of the wilds. One of the 
men jumped to his feet. ‘Good God!’ he said, 
and started toward the house at a run. We all 
followed him. The wolf was perhaps fifty feet 
ahead. He never paused, never looked back, 
never once slackened in his long, swinging gait. 
‘He’ll be in the house in a minute !’ some one be- 
side me sobbed. ‘Every door is open. Not a 
gun — not a gun on any of us.’ We burst through 
the little grove of cottonwoods, and on the other 
146 


Closed Doors 


side was a vision as strange as any of that mad 
afternoon, for standing in the door of the ranch- 
house was John Murray, waiting, his hands held 
out before him, the fingers extended and crooked; 
coming toward him was the wolf. 

“Involuntarily we stopped. We didn’t shout. 
The affair seemed prearranged. And then for the 
first time the wolf swerved; without hesitation, 
merely sheering away, he swung off around the 
corner of the house. And John Murray swung 
after him. 

“A confused time followed. It was all so queer, 
so incredible. Some of the men ran for horses, 
others for their Winchesters; I ran through the 
house and out the opposite side, and when I got 
there I saw John Murray on the edge of the 
bench, outlined against the blue of the sky; he 
was trotting, without weariness, without haste; 
thirty feet or so in front of him was the wolf. 

“And that,” said Hardy, “is about the end of 
it. We followed Murray, of course. We found 
him and the wolf up a little draw. They were 
both dead; but Murray wasn’t much torn. He 
had strangled the thing with his hands. It doesn’t 
sound possible, but he had. I couldn’t quite make 
out Eloise. She was shocked, naturally — sad- 
dened; but back of it all was the flicker of an illu- 

147 


Closed Doors 


mination — the illumination of a person who has 
come through a storm.” 

'‘But good Lord!” said Callender. “Do you 
think — You don’t really think the wolf ?” 

“I don’t think anything,” said Hardy. “I’ve 
seen too many queer things ever to interrogate; I 
merely record.” 

“The whole affair, of course, is^easily suscepti- 
ble of explanation,” interjected Roland. “I’ve 
heard before of these mad wolves.” 

“So have I,” agreed Hardy; “often. But I 
never before heard of a man knowing one was 
coming before he was told.” 


148 


THE WATER-HOLE 



THE WATER-HOLE 


S OME men are like the twang of a bow-string. 

Hardy was like that — short, lithe, sunburned, 
vivid. Into the lives of Jarrick, Hill, and my- 
self, old classmates of his, he came and went in 
the fashion of one of those queer winds that on a 
sultry day in summer blow unexpectedly up a 
city street out of nowhere. His comings excited 
us; his goings left us refreshed and a little vaguely 
discontented. So many people are gray. Hardy 
gave one a shock of color, as do the deserts and 
the mountains he inhabited. It was not particu- 
larly what he said — he didn’t talk much — it was 
his appearance, his direct, a trifle fierce, gestures, 
the sense of mysterious lands that pervaded him. 
One never knew when he was coming to New 
York and one never knew how long he was going 
to stay; he just appeared, was very busy with 
mining companies for a while, sat about clubs in 
the late afternoon, and then, one day, he was 
gone. 

Sometimes he came twice in a year; oftener, 
not for two or three years at a stretch. When he 

151 


The Water-Hole 


did come we gave him a dinner — that is, Jarrick, 
Hill, and myself. And it was rather an occasion. 
We would procure a table in the gayest restaurant 
we could find, near, but not too near, the music — 
Hill it was who first suggested this as a dramatic 
bit of incongruity between Hardy and the fre- 
quenters of Broadway — and the most exotic food 
obtainable, for, a good part of his time, Hardy, we 
knew, lived upon camp fare. Then we would 
try to make him tell about his experiences. Usu- 
ally he wouldn’t. Impersonally, he was enter- 
taining about South Africa, about the Caucasus, 
about Alaska, Mexico, anywhere you care to 
think; but concretely he might have been an illus- 
trated lecture for all he mentioned himself. He 
was passionately fond of abstract argument. 
“Y’see,” he would explain, ‘T don’t get half as 
much of this sort of thing as I want. Of course, 
one does run across remarkable people — now, I 
met^ a cow-puncher once who knew Keats by 
heart — but as a rule I deal only with material 
things, mines and prospects and assays and that 
sort of thing.” Poor chap ! I wonder if he 
thought that we, with out brokering and our 
writing and our lawyering, dealt much with ideas ! 
I remember one night when we sat up until three 
discussing the philosophy of prohibition over 
152 


The Water-Hole 


three bottles of port. I wonder how many other 
men have done the same thing ! 

But five years ago — no, it was six — Hardy 
really told us a real story about himself. Neces- 
sarily the occasion is memorable in our recollec- 
tions. We had dined at Lamb’s, and the place 
was practically empty, for it was long after the 
theatre hour — only a drowsy waiter here and 
there, and away over in one corner a young couple 
who, I suppose, imagined themselves in love. 
Fancy being in love at Lamb’s! We had been 
discussing, of all things in the world, bravery and 
conscience and cowardice and original sin, and 
that sort of business, and there was no question 
about it that Hardy was enjoying himself hugely. 
He was leaning upon the table, a cofFee-cup be- 
tween his relaxed brown hands, listening with an 
eagerness highly complimentary to the banal re- 
marks we had to make upon the subject. ‘‘This 
is talk!” he ejaculated once with a laugh. 

Hill, against the combined attack of Jarrick 
and myself, was maintaining the argument. 
“There is no such thing as instinctive bravery,” 
he affirmed, for the fifth time at least, “amongst 
intelligent men. Every one of us is naturally a 
coward. Of course we are. The more imagina- 
tion we’ve got the more we can realize how pleas- 

153 


The Water-Hole 


ant life is, after all, and how rotten the adjuncts 
of sudden death. It’s reason that does the trick 
— reason and tradition. Do you know of any 
one who is brave when he is alone — except, that 
is, when it is a case of self-preservation ? No ! 
Of course not. Did you ever hear of any one 
choosing to go along a dangerous road or to ford 
a dangerous river unless he had to — that is, any 
one of our class, any man of education or imagi- 
nation ? It’s the greater fear of being thought 
afraid that makes us brave. Take a lawyer in a 
shipwreck — take myself ! Don’t you suppose he’s 
frightened ? Naturally he is, horribly frightened. 
It’s his reason, his mind, that after a while 
gets the better of his poor pipe-stem legs and 
makes them keep pace with the sea-legs about 
them.” 

‘‘It’s condition,” said Jarrick doggedly — “con- 
dition entirely. All has to do with your liver 
and digestion. I know; I fox-hunt, and when I 
was younger — yes, leave my waist alone ! — I rode 
jumping races. When you’re fit there isn’t a 
horse alive that bothers you, or a fence, for that 
matter, or a bit of water.” 

“Ever try standing on a ship’s deck, in the 
dark, knowing you’re going to drown in about 
twenty minutes?” asked Hill. 

154 


The Water-Hole 


Hardy leaned forward to strike a match for his 
cigarette. “I don’t agree with you,” he said. 

“Well, but—” began Hill. 

“Neither of you.” 

“Oh, of course, you’re outside the argument. 
You lead an adventurous life. You keep in con- 
dition for danger. It isn’t fair.” 

“No.” Hardy lit his cigarette and inhaled a 
puff thoughtfully. “You don’t understand. All 
you have to say does have some bearing upon 
things, but, when you get down to brass tacks, 
it’s instinct — at the last gasp, it’s instinct. You 
can’t get away from it. Look at the difference 
between a thoroughbred and a cold-blooded 
horse! There you are! That’s true. It’s the 
fashion now to discount instinct, I know; well — 
but you can’t get away from it. I’ve thought 
about the thing — a lot. Men are brave against 
their better reason, against their conscience. It’s 
a mixed-up thing. It’s confusing and — and sort 
of damnable,” he concluded lamely. 

“Sort of damnable!” ejaculated Hill wonder- 
ingly. 

“Yes, damnable.” 

I experienced inspiration. “You’ve got ‘a con- 
crete instance back of that,” I ventured. 

Hardy removed his gaze from the ceiling. 

155 


The Water-Hole 

‘‘Er — ” he stammered. ‘‘Why, yes — ^yes. That’s 
true.” 

“You’d better tell it,” suggested Hill; “other- 
wise your argument is not very conclusive.” 

Hardy fumbled with the spoon of his empty 
coffee-cup. It was a curious gesture on the part 
of a man whose franknesses were as clean-cut as 
his silences. “Well — ” he began. “I don’t 
know. Perhaps. I did know a man, though, 
who saved another man’s life when he didn’t 
want to, when there was every excuse for him 
not to, when he had it all reasoned out that it 
was wrong, the very wrongest possible thing to 
do; and he saved him because he couldn’t help it, 
saved him at the risk of his own life, too.” 

“He did!” murmured Hill incredulously. 

“Go on I” I urged. I was aware that we were 
on the edge of a revelation. 

Hardy looked down at the spoon in his hand, 
then up and into my eyes. 

“It’s such a queer place to tell it” — he smiled 
deprecatingly — “here, in this restaurant. It ought 
to be about a camp-fire, or something like that. 
Here it seems out of place, like the smell of bacon 
or sweating mules. Do you know Los Pinos ? 
Well, you wouldn’t. It was just a few shacks 
and a Mexican gambling-house when I saw it. 

156 


The Water-Hole 


Maybe it isn’t there any more, at all. You know 
— those places ! People build them and then go 
away, and in a year there isn’t a thing, just desert 
again and shifting sand and maybe the little origi- 
nal old ranch by the one spring.” He swept the 
table-cloth with his hand, as if sweeping some- 
thing into oblivion, and his eyes sought again the 
spoon. ‘‘It’s queer, that business. Men and 
women go out to lonely places and build houses, 
and for a while everything goes on in miniature, 
just as it does here — daily bread and hating and 
laughing — and then something happens, the gold 
gives out or the fields won’t pay, and in no time 
nature is back again. It’s a big fight. You lose 
track of it in crowded places.” He raised his 
head and settled his arms comfortably on the 
table. 

“I wasn’t there for any particular purpose. I 
was on a holiday. I’d been on a big job up in 
Colorado and was rather done up, and, as there 
were some prospects in New Mexico I wanted to 
see, I hit south, drifting through Santa Fe and 
Silver City, until I found myself way down on 
the southern edge of Arizona. It was still hot 
down there — hot as blazes — it was about the first 
of September — and the rattlesnakes and the scor- 
pions were still as active as crickets. I knew a 

157 


The Water-Hole 


chap that had a cattle outfit near the Mexican 
border, so I dropped in on him one day and stayed 
two weeks. You see, he was lonely. Had a pas- 
sion for theatres and hadn’t seen a play for five 
years. My second-hand gossip was rather a god- 
send. But finally I got tired of talking about 
Mary Mannering, and decided to start north 
again. He bade me good-by on a little hill near 
his place. ‘See here!’ he said suddenly, looking 
toward the west. ‘If you go a trifle out of your 
way you’ll strike Los Pinos, and I wish you would. 
It’s a little bit of a dump of the United Copper 
Company’s, no good. I’m thinking, but the fellow 
in charge is a friend of mine. He’s got his wife 
there. They’re nice people — or used to be. I 
haven’t seen them for ten years. They say he 
drinks a little — ^well, we all do. Maybe you could 
write me how she — I mean, how he is getting 
on ? ’ And he turned red. I saw how the land 
lay, and as a favor to him I said I would. 

“It was eighty miles away, and I drifted in 
there one night on top of a tired cow-horse just 
at sundown. You know how purple — violet, 
really — those desert evenings are. There was 
violet stretching away as far as I could see, from 
the faint violet at my stirrups to the deep, almost 
black violet of the horizon. Way off to the north 
158 


The Water-Hole 

I could make out the shadow of some big hills 
that had been ahead of me all day. The town, 
what there was of it, lay in a little gully. Along 
its single street there were a few lights shining 
like small yellow flowers. I asked my way of a 
Mexican, and he showed me up to where the 
Whitneys — that name will do as well as any — 
lived, in a decent enough sort of bungalow, it 
would seem, above the gully. He left me there, 
and I went forward and rapped at the door. 
Light shone from between the cracks of a near-by 
shutter, and I could hear voices inside — a man’s 
voice mostly, hoarse and high-pitched. Then a 
Chinaman opened the door for me and I had a 
look inside, into a big living-room beyond. It 
was civilized all right enough, pleasantly so to a 
man stepping out of two days of desert and Mexi- 
can adobes. At a ghnce I saw the rugs on the 
polished floor, and the Navajo blankets about, 
and a big table in the centre with a shaded lamp 
and magazines in rows; but the man in riding- 
clothes standing before the empty fireplace wasn’t 
civilized at all, at least not at that moment. I 
couldn’t see the woman, only the top of her head 
above the back of a big chair, but as I came in I 
heard her say, ‘Hush! — Bob — please!’ and I no- 
ticed that what I could see of her hair was of that 

159 


The Water-Hole 


fine true gold you so seldom find. The man 
stopped in the middle of a sentence and swayed 
on his feet, then he looked over at me and came 
toward me with a sort of bulldog, inquiring look. 
He was a big, red-faced, blond chap, about forty, 
I should say, who might once have been hand- 
some. He wasn’t now, and it didn’t add to his 
beauty that he was quite obviously fairly drunk. 
‘Well?’ he said, and blocked my way. 

‘“I’m a friend of Henry Martin’s,’ I answered. 
‘I’ve got a letter for you.’ I was beginning to 
get pretty angry. 

“‘Henry Martin?’ He laughed unsteadily. 
‘You’d better give it to my wife over there. 
She’s his friend. I hardly know him.’ I don’t 
know when I’d seen a man I disliked as much at 
first sight. 

“There was a rustle from the other side of the 
room, and Mrs. Whitney came toward us. I 
avoided her unattractive husband and took her 
hand, and I understood at once whatever civiliz- 
ing influences there were about the bungalow we 
were in. Did you ever do that — ever step out of 
nowhere, in a wild sort of country, and meet sud- 
denly a man or a woman who might have come 
straight from a pleasant, well-bred room filled 
with books and flowers and quiet, nice people ? 
i6o 


The Water-Hole 

It’s a sensation that never loses its freshness. 
Mrs. Whitney was like that. I wouldn’t have 
called her beautiful; she was better; you knew 
she was good and clean-cut and a thoroughbred 
the minute you saw her. She was lovely, too; 
don’t misunderstand me, but you had more im- 
portant things to think about when you were 
talking to her. Just at the moment I was won- 
dering how any one who so evidently had been 
crying could all at once greet a stranger with so 
cordial a smile. But she was all that — all nerve; 
I don’t think I ever met a woman quite like her — 
so fine, you understand.” 

Hardy paused. “Have any of you chaps got a 
cigarette he asked; and I noticed that his hand, 
usually the steadiest hand imaginable, trem- 
bled ever so slightly. “Well,” he began again, 
“there you are! I had tumbled into about as 
rotten a little, pitiful a little tragedy as you can 
imagine, there in a God-forsaken desert of Ari- 
zona, with not a soul about but a Chinaman, a 
couple of Scotch stationary engineers, an Irish 
foreman, two or three young mining men, and a 
score of Mexicans. Of course, my first impulse 
was to get out the next morning, to cut it — it was 
none of my business — although I determined to 
drop a line to Henry Martin; but I didn’t go. I 

i6i 


The Water-Hole 


had a talk with Mrs. Whitney that night, after 
her unattractive husband had taken himself off 
to bed, and somehow I couldn’t leave just then. 
You know how it is, you drop into a place where 
nothing in the world seems likely to happen, and 
all of a sudden you realize that something is going 
to happen, and for the life of you you can’t go 
away. That situation up on top of the hill 
couldn’t last forever, could it ? So I stayed on. 
I hunted out the big Irish foreman and shared 
his cabin. The Whitneys asked me to visit them, 
but I didn’t exactly feel like doing so. The Irish- 
man was a fine specimen of his race, ten years 
out from Dublin, and everywhere else since that 
time; generous, irascible, given to great fits of 
gayety and equally unexpected fits of gloom. He 
would sit in the evenings, a short pipe in his 
mouth, and stare up at the Whitney bungalow on 
the hill above. 

‘^‘That Jim Whitney’s a divvle,’ he confided 
to me once. ‘Wan o’ these days I’ll hit him over 
th’ head with a pick and be hung for murther. 
Now, what in hell d’ye suppose a nice girl like 
that sticks by him for ? If it weren’t for her I’d 
’a’ reported him long ago. The scut!’ And I 
remember that he spat gloomily. 

“ But I got to know the answer to that question 
162 


<1 


The Water-Hole 

sooner than I had expected. You see, I went up 
to the Whitneys’ often, in the afternoon, or for 
dinner, or in the evening, and I talked to Mrs. 
Whitney a great deal; although sometimes I just 
sat and smoked and listened to her play the piano. 
She played beautifully. It was a treat to a man 
who hadn’t heard music for two years. There 
was a little thing of Grieg’s — a spring song, or 
something of the sort — and you’ve no idea how 
quaint and sad and appealing it was, and incon- 
gruous, with all its freshness and murmuring about 
waterfalls and pine-trees, there, in those hot, 
breathless Arizona nights. Mrs. Whitney didn’t 
talk much; she wasn’t what you’d call a particu- 
larly communicative woman, but bit by bit I 
pieced together something continuous. It seems 
that she had run away with Whitney ten years 
before — Oh, yes ! Henry Martin ! That had 
been a schoolgirl affair. Nothing serious, you 
understand. But the Whitney matter had been 
different. She was greatly in love with him. 
And the family had disapproved. Some rich, 
stuffy Boston people, I gathered. But she had 
made up her mind and taken matters in her own 
hands. That was her way — a clean-cut sort of 
person — like a gold-and-white arrow; and now 
she was going to stick by her choice no matter 
163 


The Water-Hole 

what happened; owed it to Whitney. There was 
the quirk in her brain; we all have a quirk some- 
where, and that was hers. She felt that she had 
ruined his career; he had been a brilliant young 
engineer, but her family had kicked up the devil 
of a row, and, as they were powerful enough, and 
nasty enough, had more or less hounded him out 
of the East. Of course, personally, I never 
thought he showed any of the essentials of bril- 
liancy, but that’s neither here nor there; she did, 
and she was satisfied that she owed him all she 
had. I suppose, too, there was some trace of a 
Puritan conscience back of it, some inherent feel- 
ing about divorce; and there was pride as well, a 
desire not to let that disgusting family of hers 
know into what ways her idol had fallen. Any- 
way, she was adamant — oh, yes, I made no bones 
about it, I up and asked her one night why she 
didn’t get rid of the hound. So there she was, 
that white-and-gold woman, with her love of 
music, and her love of books, and her love of fine 
things, and her gentleness, and that sort of fiery, 
suppressed Northern blood, shut up on top of an 
Arizona dump with a beast that got drunk every 
night and twice a day on Sunday. It was worse 
even than that. One night — ^we were sitting out 
on the veranda — her scarf slipped, and I saw a 
164 


The Water-Hole 


scar on her arm, near her shoulder.” Hardy 
stopped abruptly and began to roll a little pellet 
of bread between his thumb and his forefinger; 
then his tense expression faded and he sat back 
in his chair. 

“Let me have another cigarette,” he said to 
Jarrick. “No. Wait a minute! Fll order some.” 

He called a waiter and gave his instructions. 
“You see,” he continued, “when you run across 
as few nice women as I do that sort of thing is 
more than ordinarily disturbing. And then I 
suppose it was the setting, and her loneliness, and 
everything. Anyway, I stayed on. I got to be 
a little bit ashamed of myself. I was afraid that 
Mrs. Whitney would think me prompted by mere 
curiosity or a desire to meddle, so after a while 
I gave out that I was prospecting that part of 
Arizona, and in the mornings I would take a 
horse and ride out into the desert. I loved it, 
too; it was so big and spacious and silent and hot. 
One day I met Whitney on the edge of town. 
He was sober, as he always was when he had to 
be; he was a masterful brute, in his way. He 
stopped me and asked if I had found anything, 
and when I laughed he didn’t laugh b ack. ‘ There’s 
gold here,’ he said. ‘Lots of gold. Did you ever 
hear the story of the Ten Strike Mine ? Well, it’s 
i6s 


The Water-Hole 


over there/ He swept with his arm the line of 
distant hills to the north. ‘The crazy Dutchman 
that found it staggered into Almuda, ten miles 
down the valley, just before he died; and his pock- 
ets were bulging with samples — pure gold, almost. 
Yes, by thunder! And that’s the last they ever 
heard of it. Lots of men have tried — lots of 
men. Some day I’ll go myself, surer than shoot- 
ing.’ And he let his hands drop to his sides and 
stared silently toward the north, a queer, dreamy 
anger in his eyes. I’ve seen lots of mining men, 
lots of prospectors, in my time, and it didn’t take 
me long to size up that look of his. ‘Aha, my 
friend 1’ I said to myself. ‘So you’ve got another 
vice, have you! It isn’t only rum that’s got a 
hold on you!’ And I turned my horse into the 
town. 

“But our conversation seemed to have stirred 
to the surface something in Whitney’s brain that 
had been at work there a long time, for after that 
he would never let me alone about his Ten Strike 
Mine and the mountains that hid it. ‘Over 
there!’ he would say, and point to the north. 
From the porch of his bungalow the sleeping hills 
were plainly visible above the shimmering desert. 
He would chew on the end of a cigar and con- 
sider. ‘It isn’t very far, you know. One day — 

i66 


The Water-Hole 


maybe two. All we need’s water. No water 
there — at least, none found. All those fellows 
who’ve prospected are fools. I’m an expert; so 
are you. I tell you, Hardy, let’s do it ! A half a 
dozen little old pack-mules ! Eh ? How about it ? 
Next week ? I can get off. God, I’d like money !’ 
And he would subside into a sullen silence. At 
first I laughed at him; but I can tell you that 
sort of thing gets on your nerves sooner or later 
and either makes you bolt it or else go. At the 
end of two weeks I actually found myself consid- 
ering the fool thing seriously. Of course, I didn’t 
want to discover a lost gold-mine, that is, unless 
I just happened to stumble over it; I wanted to 
keep away from such things; they’re bad; they 
get into a man’s blood like drugs; but I’ve always 
had a hankering for a new country, and those 
hills, shining in the heat, were compelling — very 
compelling. Besides, I reflected, a trip like that 
might help to straighten Whitney up a little. I 
hadn’t much hope, to be sure, but drowning men 
clutch at straws. It’s curious what sophistry 
you use to convince yourself, isn’t it ? And then 
— something happened that for two weeks occu- 
pied all my mind.” 

Hardy paused, considered for a moment the 
glowing end of his cigarette, and finally looked up 
167 


The Water-Hole 

gravely; there was a slight hesitation, almost an 
embarrassment, in his manner. ‘‘I don’t exactly 
know how to put it,” he began. ‘‘I don’t want 
you chaps to imagine anything wrong; it was all 
very nebulous and indefinite, you understand — 
Mrs. Whitney was a wonderful woman. I would- 
n’t mention the matter at all if it wasn’t neces- 
sary for the point of my story; in fact, it is the 
point of my story. But there was a man there — 
one of the young engineers — and quite suddenly I 
discovered that he was in love with Mrs. Whit- 
ney, and I think — I never could be quite sure, 
but I think she was in love with him. It must 
have been one of those sudden things, a storm out 
of a clear sky, deluging two people before they 
were aware. I imagine it was brought to the 
surface by the chap’s illness. He had been out 
riding on the desert and had got olF to look at 
something, and a rattlesnake had struck him — a 
big, dust-dirty thing — on the wrist, and, very 
faint, he had galloped back to the Whitneys’. 
And what do you suppose she had done — Mrs. 
Whitney, that is ? Flung herself down on him 
and sucked the wound ! Yes, without a moment’s 
hesitation, her gold hair all about his hand and 
her white dress in the dirt. Of course, it. was a 
foolish thing to do, and not in the least the right 

i68 


The Water-Hole 


way to treat a wound, but she had risked her life 
to do it; a slight cut on her lip; you understand; 
a tiny, ragged place. Afterward, she had cut the 
wound crosswise, so, and had put on a ligature, 
and then had got the man into the house some 
way and nursed him until he was quite himself 
again. I dare say he had been in love with her a 
long while without knowing it, but that clinched 
matters. Those things come overpoweringly and 
take a man, down in places like that — semitropi- 
cal and lonely and lawless, with long, empty days 
and moonlit nights. Perhaps he told Mrs. Whit- 
ney; he never got very far, I am sure. She was 
a wonderful woman — but she loved him, I think. 
You can tell those things, you know; a gesture, 
an unavoidable look, a silence. 

‘‘Anjrway, I saw what had happened and I 
was sorry, and for a fortnight I hung around, 
loath to go, but hating myself all the while for 
not doing so. And every day Whitney would 
come at me with his insane scheme. ‘Over there ! 
It isn’t very far. A day — maybe two. How 
about it? Eh?’ and then that tense sweep of 
the arm to the north. I don’t know what it was, 
weariness, disgust, irritation of the whole sorry 
plan of things, but finally, and to my own aston- 
ishment, I found myself consenting, and within 
169 


The Water-Hole 


two days Whitney had his crazy pack outfit ready, 
and on the morning of the third day we set out. 
Mrs. Whitney had said nothing when we unfolded 
our intentions to her, nor did she say anything 
when we departed, but stood on the porch of the 
bungalow, her hand up to her throat, and watched 
us out of sight. I wondered what she was think- 
ing about. The Voodoos — that was the name of 
the mountains we were heading for — had killed a 
good many men in their time.” 

Hardy took a long and thoughtful sip from the 
glass in front of him before he began again. 
“IVe knocked about a good deal in my life,” he 
said; ‘‘IVe been lost — once in the jungle; Fve 
starved; I’ve reached the point where I’ve imag- 
ined horrors, heard voices, you understand, and 
seen great, bearded men mouthing at me — a man’s 
pretty far gone when that happens to him — but 
that trip across the desert was the worst I’ve ever 
taken. By day it was all right, just swaying in 
your saddle, half asleep a good part of the time, 
the smell of warm dust in your nose, the pack- 
mules plodding along behind; but the nights! 
— I tell you. I’ve sat about camp-fires up the 
Congo and watched big, oily black men eat their 
food, and I once saw a native village sacked, but 
I’d rather be tied for life to a West Coast nigger 
170 


The Water-Hole 

than to a man like Whitney. It isn’t good for 
two people to be alone in a place like that and for 
one to hate the other as I hated him. God knows 
why I didn’t kill him; I’d have to get up and leave 
the lire and go out into the night, and, mind you. 
I’d be shuddering like a man with the ague under 
that warm, soft air. And he never for a minute 
suspected it. His mind was scarred with drink 
as if a worm had bored its slow way in and out 
of it. I can see him now, cross-legged, beyond 
the flames, big, unshaven, heavy-jowled, dirty, 
what he thought dripping from his mouth like 
the bacon drippings he was too lazy to wipe 
away. I won’t tell you what he talked about; 
you know, the old thing; but not the way even 
the most wrong-minded of ordinary men talks; 
there was a sodden, triumphant deviltry in him 
that was appalling. He cursed the country for 
its lack of opportunity of a certain kind; he was 
like a hound held in leash, gloating over what he 
would do when he got back to the kennels of 
civilization again. And all the while, at the back 
of my mind, was a picture of that white-and-gold 
woman of his, way back toward the south, wait- 
ing his return because she owed him her life for 
the brilliant career she had ruined. It made you 
sometimes almost want to laugh — insanely. I 
171 


The Water-Hole 


used to lie awake at night and pray whatever 
there was to kill him, and do it quickly. I would 
have turned back, but I felt that every day I 
could keep him away from Los Pinos was a day 
gained for Mrs. Whitney. He was a dangerous 
maniac, too. The first day he behaved himself 
fairly well, but that night, after supper, when 
we had cleaned up, he began to fumble through 
the packs, and finally produced a bottle of brandy. 

“‘Fine camping stuff!’ he announced. ‘Lots 
of results for very little weight. Have some?’ 

“‘Are you going to drink that ?’ I asked. 

“‘Oh, go to the devil!’ he snapped. ‘I’ve 
been out as much as you have.’ I didn’t argue 
with him further; I hoped if he drank enough the 
sun would get him. But the second night he upset 
the water-kegs, two of them. He had been carry- 
ing on some sort of weird celebration by himself, 
and finally staggered out into the desert, singing 
at the top of his lungs, and the first thing I knew 
he was down among the kegs, rolling over and 
over, and kicking right and left. The one that 
was open was gone; another he kicked the plug 
out of, but I managed to save about a quarter of 
its contents. The next morning I spoke to him 
about it. He blinked his red eyes and chuckled. 

“‘Poor sort of stuff, anyway,’ he said. 

172 



“I’d have to get up and leave the fire and go out into the night.” 




The Water-Hole 


‘‘‘Yes,’ I agreed; ‘but without it you would 
blow out like a candle in a dust-storm.’ After 
that we didn’t speak to each other except when it 
was necessary. 

“We were in the foot-hills of the Voodoos by 
now, and the next day we got into the mountains 
themselves — great, bare ragged peaks, black and 
red and dirty yellow, like the cooled-ofF slake of a 
furnace. Every now and then a dry gully came 
down from nowheres; and the only human thing 
one could see was occasionally, on the sides of 
one of these, a shivering, miserable, half-dead 
pihon — nothing but that, and the steel-blue sky 
overhead, and the shimmering desert behind us. 
It was hot — good Lord ! The horn of your sad- 
dle burned your hand. That night we camped in 
a canyon, and the next day went still higher up, 
following the course of a rutted stream that prob- 
ably ran water once in a year. Whitney wanted 
to turn east, and it was all a toss-up to me; the 
place looked unlikely enough, anyway, although 
you never can tell. I had settled into the mo- 
notony of the trip by now and didn’t much care 
how long we stayed out. One day was like an- 
other — hot little swirls of dust, sweat of mules, 
and great black clilFs; and the nights came and 
went like the passing of a sponge over a fevered 

173 


The Water-Hole 


face. On the sixth day the tragedy happened. 
It was toward dusk, and one of the mules, the 
one that carried the last of our water, fell over a 
cliiF. 

“He wasn’t hurt; just lay on his back and 
smiled crossly; but the kegs and the bags were 
smashed to bits. I like mules, but I wanted to 
kill that one. It was quiet down there in the 
canyon — quiet and hot. I looked at Whitney and 
he looked at me, and I had the sudden, unpleas- 
ant realization that he was a coward, added to 
his other qualifications. Yes, a coward! I saw 
it in his blurred eyes and the quivering of his 
bloated lips — stark dumb funk. That was bad. 
I’m afraid I lost my nerve, too; I make no excuses; 
fear is infectious. At all events, we tore down 
out of that place as if death was after us, the 
mules clattering and flapping in the rear. After 
a time I rode more slowly, but in the morning we 
were nearly down at the desert again; and there 
it lay before us, shimmering like a lake of salt — 
two days back to water. 

“The next day was rather a blur, as if a 
man were walking on a red-hot mirror that tipped 
up and down and tried to take his legs from under 
him. There was a water-hole a little to the east 
of the way we had come, and toward that I tried 

174 


The Water-Hole 


to head. One of the mules gave out, and stag- 
gered and groaned, and tried to get up again. I 
remember hearing him squeal, once; it was horri- 
ble. He lay there, a little black speck on the 
desert. Whitney and I didn’t speak to each other 
at all, but I thought of those two kegs of water 
he had upset. Have you ever been thirsty — 
mortally thirsty, until you feel your tongue black 
in your mouth ? It’s queer what it does to you. 
Do you remember that little place — Zorn’s — at 
college ? We used to sit there sometimes on 
spring afternoons. It was cool and cavern-like, 
and through the open door one could see the 
breeze in the maple-trees. Well, I thought about 
that all the time; it grew to be an obsession, a 
mirage. I could smell the moss-like smell of 
bock beer; I even remembered conversations we 
had had. You fellows were as real to me as you 
are real to-night. It’s strange, and then, when 
you come to, uncanny; you feel the sweat on you 
turn cold. 

‘‘We had ridden on in that way I don’t know 
how long, snatching a couple of feverish hours of 
sleep in the night, Whitney groaning and mum- 
bling horribly, when suddenly my horse gave a lit- 
tle snicker — low, the way they do when you give 
them grain — and I felt his tired body straighten 
175 


The Water-Hole 

Up ever so little. ^ Maybe/ I thought, and I 
looked up. But I didn’t much care; I just wanted 
to crawl into some cool place and forget all about 
it and die. It was late in the afternoon. My 
shadow was lengthening. Too late, really, for 
much mirage; but I no longer put great stock in 
green vegetation and matters of that kind; I had 
seen too much of it in the last day and a half 
fade away into nothing — nothing but blistering, 
damned sand. And so I wouldn’t believe the 
cool reeds and the sparkling water until I had 
dipped down through a little swale and was actu- 
ally fighting my horse back from the brink. I 
knew enough to do that, mind you, and to fight 
back the two mules so that they drank just a lit- 
tle at a time — a little at a time; and all the while 
I had to wait, with my tongue like sand in my 
mouth. Over the edge of my horse’s neck I 
could see the water just below; it looked as cool 
as rain. I was always a little proud of that — 
that holding back; it made up, in a way, for the 
funk of two nights earlier. When the mules and 
my horse were through I dismounted and, lying 
flat, bathed my hands, and then, a tiny sip at a 
time, began to drink. That was hard. When I 
stood up the heat seemed to have gone, and the 
breeze was moist and sweet with the smell of eve- 
176 


The Water-Hole 


ning. I think I sang a little and waved my Hands 
above my head, and, at all events, I remember I 
lay on my back and rolled a cigarette; and quite 
suddenly and without the slightest reason there 
were tears in my eyes. Then I began to wonder 
what had become of Whitney; I hadn’t thought 
of him before. I got to my feet, and just as I 
did so I saw him come over the little rise of sand, 
swaying in his saddle, and trying, the fool, to 
make his horse run. He looked like a great scare- 
crow blown out from some Indian maize-field into 
the desert. His clothes were torn and his mask 
of a face was seamed and black from dust and 
sweat; he saw the water and let out one queer, 
hoarse screech and kicked at his horse with wab- 
bling legs. 

‘‘‘Look out!’ I cried, and stepped in his way. 
I had seen this sort of thing before and knew 
what to expect; but he rode me down as if I 
hadn’t been there. His horse tried to avoid me, 
and the next moment the sack of grain on its 
back was on the sands, creeping like a great, 
monstrous, four-legged thing toward the water. 
‘Stay where you are,’ I said, ‘and I’ll bring you 
some.’ But he only crawled the faster. I 
grabbed his shoulder. ‘ Y ou fool I ’ I said. ‘ Y ou’ll 
kill yourself!’ 


177 


The Water-Hole 


*“Damn you!’ he blubbered. ‘Damn you!’ 
And before I knew it, and with all the strength, I 
imagine, left in him, he was on his feet and I was 
looking down the barrel of his gun. It looked 
very round and big and black, too. Beyond it 
his eyes were regarding me; they were quite mad, 
there was no doubt about that, but, just the way 
a dying man achieves some of his old desire to 
live, there was definite purpose in them. ‘You 
get out of my way,’ he said, and began very slowly 
to circle me. You could hardly hear his words, 
his lips were so blistered and swollen. 

“And now this is the point of what I am telling 
you.” Hardy fumbled again for a match and 
relit his cigarette. “There we were, we two, in 
that desert light, about ten feet from the water, 
he with his gun pointing directly at my heart — 
and his hand wasn’t trembling as much as you 
would imagine, either — and he was circling me 
step by step, and I was standing still. I suppose 
the whole aflFair took two minutes, maybe three, 
but in that time — and my brain was still blurred 
to other impressions — I saw the thing as clearly 
as I see it now, as clearly as I saw that great, 
swollen beast of a face. Here was the chance I 
had longed for, the hope I had lain awake at 
night and prayed for; between the man and death 
178 


The Water-Hole 

I alone stood; and I had every reason, every In- 
stinct of decency and common sense, to make 
me step aside. The man was a devil; he was 
killing the finest woman I had ever met; his pres- 
ence poisoned the air he walked in; he was an 
active agent of evil, there was no doubt of that. 
I hated him as I had never hated anything else 
in my life, and at the moment I was sure that 
God wanted him to die. I knew then that to 
save him would be criminal; I think so still. And 
I saw other considerations as well; saw them as 
clearly as I see you sitting here. I saw the man 
who loved Mrs. Whitney, and I saw Mrs. Whit- 
ney herself, and in my keeping, I knew, was all 
her chance for happiness, the one hope that the 
future would make up to her for some of the hor- 
ror of the past. It would have been an easy 
thing to do; the most ordinary caution was on 
my side. Whitney was far larger than I, and, 
even in his weakened condition — I was weak my- 
self — stronger, and he had a gun that in a flash 
of light could blow me into eternity. And what 
would happen then ? Why, when he got back to 
Los Pinos they would hang him; they would be 
only too glad of the chance; and his wife? — she 
would die; I knew it — ^just go out like a flame 
from the unbearableness of it all. And there^ 
179 


The Water-Hole 


wasn’t one chance in a thousand that he wouldn’t 
kill me if I made a single step toward him. I had 
only to let him go and in a few minutes he would 
be dead — as dead as his poor brute of a horse 
would be within the hour. I felt already the 
cool relief that would be mine when the black 
shadow of him was gone. I would ride into town 
and think no more of it than if I had watched a 
tarantula die. You see, I had it all reasoned out 
as clearly as could be; there was morality and 
common sense, the welfare of other people, the 
man’s own good, really, and yet — ^well, I didn’t 
do it.” 

“Didn’t.?” It was Jarrick who put the ques- 
tion a little breathlessly. 

“No. I stepped toward him — so! One step, 
then another, very slowly, hardly a foot at a 
time, and all the while I watched the infernal cir- 
cle of that gun, expecting it every minute to spit 
fire. I didn’t want to go; I went against my will. 
I was scared, too, mortally scared; my legs were 
like lead — I had to think every time I lifted a 
foot — and in a queer, crazy way I seemed to feel 
two people, a man and a woman, holding me 
back, plucking at my sleeves. But I went. All 
the time I kept saying, very steady and quiet: 
‘ Don’t shoot, Whitney I D’you hear ! Don’t 
i8o' 



“I kept saying, very steady and quiet: ‘Don’t shoot, Whitney! 
Don’t shoot or I’ll kill you !’” 





The Water-Hole 


shoot or I’ll kill you!’ Wasn’t it silly? Kill 
him ! Why, he had me dead ten times before I 
got to him. But I suppose some trace of sanity 
was knocking at his drink-sodden brain, for he 
didn’t shoot — ^just watched me, his red eyes blink- 
ing. So ! One step at a time — nearer and nearer 
— I could feel the sweat on my forehead — and 
then I jumped. I had him by the legs, and we 
went down in a heap. He shot then; they always 
do ! But I had him tied up with the rags of his 
own shirt in a trice. Then I brought him water 
in my hat and let him drink it, drop by drop. 
After a while he came to altogether. But he never 
thanked me; he wasn’t that kind of a brute. I 
got him into town the morning of the second day 
and turned him over to his wife. So you see” — 
Hardy hesitated and looked at the circle of our 
faces with an odd, appealing look — “it is queer, 
isn’t it All mixed up. One doesn’t know.” 
He sank back in his chair and began to scratch, 
absent-mindedly, at a holder with a match. 

The after-theatre crowd was beginning to come 
in; the sound of laughter and talk grew steadily 
higher; far off an orchestra wailed inarticulately. 

“What became of them V’ I asked. 

Hardy looked up as if startled. “The Whit- 
neys } Oh — she died — Martin wrote me. Down 

i8i 


The Water-Hole 


there, within a year. One would know it would 
happen. Like a flame, I suppose — suddenly.” 

‘‘And the man — the fellow who was in love 
with her.f^” 

Hardy stirred wearily. ‘‘ I haven’t heard,” he 
said. “I suppose he is still alive.” 

He leaned over to complete the striking of his 
match, and for an instant his arm touched a 
glass; it trembled and hung in the balance, and 
he shot out a sinewy hand to stop it, and as he 
did so the sleeve of his dinner-jacket caught. On 
the brown flesh of his forearm I saw a queer, rag- 
ged white cross — the scar a snake-bite leaves 
when it is cicatriced. I meant to avoid his eyes, 
but somehow I caught them instead. They were 
veiled and hurt. 


182 


LE PANACHE 



LE PANACHE 


W HEN a man comes into Maxim’s — the pre- 
war Maxim’s — at ten o’clock of a spring 
night, just when gayety has reached a zenith, sits 
down beside you, nods with an air of acquain- 
tanceship to the head waiter, gives him a twenty- 
franc piece, and requests him in excellent French 
to have the orchestra play the love-song from 
“Samson and Delilah,” the incident has about it 
something of interest. When the man in ques- 
tion leans back with speculative intensity in his 
far-sighted gray eyes and a half-smile hovering 
about his determined, clean-shaven mouth your 
interest vacillates between admiration and dis- 
like. No matter how charmingly done, it would 
impress a spectator as procedure not altogether 
to be commended if — in hell, say — a shade from 
a happier climate were to walk rapidly through, 
carrying in each hand a bucket of water untast- 
able by the lambent-eyed spectres lined up on 
either side of him. There is about such an action 
an especial kind of imaginative cruelty. 

Out of the babble of voices, the laughter; into 
the cigarette smoke and the smell of flowers and 

185 


Le Panache 


perfume suddenly threaded the lovely ribbon of 
the music. A woman across the way laid down 
her fork and stared; a boy beside her, fresh-col- 
ored, charming in his evening clothes, raised his 
head. One had an impression of a score of amus- 
ing stories suspended in mid-air; one had an im- 
pression of leaving a stifling city in mid-August 
and coming to a place where pine forests reach 
down to a blue-and-white sea. Only it isn’t fair 
to take people to such a coast when immediately 
they must return to the fetid alleys where they 
live. I turned to the man beside me. 

“Do you do this sort of thing often?” I 
asked. 

He started, as if up to the moment he had not 
been acutely aware of my presence; then he 
smiled. It was a charming smile, disarming, 
good-tempered, alert. He pushed back his glass 
of champagne. 

“No.” He shook his head. “No; I don’t do 
this sort of thing often. No, never before, as a 
matter of fact.” He studied the quiet, a trifle 
astonished, greatly sobered people around him. 
“Probably,” he continued, “I shall never do it 
again. It isn’t exactly what the English call 
‘cricket,’ is it? And yet — life’s largely a matter 
of moments, isn’t it ? and what’s best — unrelieved 

i86 


Le Panache 


sordidness, or perhaps for once a lark singing 
above the courtyard of a tenement? Well, I 
wanted to see, anyway.” He reflected. ‘‘My 
impulses are not always kindly,” he concluded. 

Ingenuousness and subtlety are a rare combina- 
tion; I studied my new-found companion with 
interest. He was a slight, tall man of thirty-five 
or thirty-seven, and his dress clothes expressed 
to the smallest detail the unusual qualities of 
precision and intuition. His dark hair was pre- 
maturely gray — carefully parted and brushed 
back from his forehead — and underneath it was 
a keen and youthful face — an exceptional face, 
distinctly American in its spare lines and clean- 
cut chin, and yet with a look about it as if its 
possessor had seen intimately many lands. More- 
over, it was the face of a man who both thought 
and acted; of a man who had read and a man 
who had driven ships, or ridden horses, or per- 
haps both, against winds. Above the fresh col- 
oring of the cheeks were a few little lines and 
above these again a warm and permanent sun- 
burn; and the thin mouth held a suggestion of 
grimnesses that could be instantly recaptured 
should occasion arise — the grimnesses of a mouth 
accustomed to taste without complaining the in- 
cessant vagaries of nature. There is no confus- 
187 


Le Panache 


ing the inevitable lurking grimness of an outdoor 
man with the thin acerbity of his indoor neighbor. 
About the former is a concomitant humor. 

We ordered supper; we talked; around us the 
laughter swelled again. 

And life is that way, isn’t it? Altogether a 
matter of chance, except that you can’t altogether 
escape the sense that back of the chance is per- 
haps an ultimate design. One so often does find 
important events, important friends-to-be, on a 
steamer casually taken; on a mountain trail casu- 
ally chosen; out of the blue; without forewarning, 
I might so easily have missed Hugh Craig that 
night. I was on the point of leaving Maxim’s 
when he came in and took the seat beside me. 

He had been born, it seems, in Pennsylvania, 
the northern part of the State, where his father 
had foundries and a huge acreage. I achieved a 
picture of a life. almost feudal: a great old-fash- 
ioned house; workmen, until recently, at all events, 
descendants of men who had worked for the 
Craigs since before the War of Independence; 
wide fields; and a town with, at one end of it, 
immense iron-shops that lay upon the greenness 
of the surrounding country like soot knocked 
from a stove-pipe onto a lawn. Craig had a 
family — a father with a long white beard and cer- 

i88 


Le Panache 


tarn undiscussable ideas of right and wrong. I 
gathered that he had worked too hard ever to 
experience any God except one who was an ex- 
pert bookkeeper — a sort of minor bureaucrat 
whose mind never overlooked a single cent on 
the debit or credit side, no matter how many gold 
pieces you might otherwise fling to a starving 
world. There was also a mother, a gentle, chari- 
table soul whose preoccupation was the town and 
countryside over which, without any questioning 
on her part of social justice, she found herself 
mistress. Like many women she labored with 
hands not too intelligent to assuage the cunning 
wrongs of a system upon which her men-folk were 
concentrating all their energies to the task of 
making it more and more unbearable. Then 
there was a sister, who had married a Spaniard, 
and an elder brother who apparently, in the eyes 
of Craig’s father, was all that Craig himself was 
not. Here, you perceive, was an older generation 
and two survivals of that generation, and a fifth 
member of the family who was not a survival at 
all. Between him and all the rest of his kin was 
distinct cleavage; and as a rule cleavage makes 
for history. One surmised the modern vast and 
vague discontent, a searching for new and — but 
here is the diflSculty — ^workable ideals. 

189 


Le Panache 


You must understand me — ^what I learned of 
Craig at that first meeting was not in any con- 
nected way — not as a narrative, not by direct 
statement. He was, as I subsequently discov- 
ered, the last man in the world to talk his soul 
out to any one about his personal relationships. 
Nor was he enough of an egotist to indulge him- 
self in the contemporaneous pastime of deprecat- 
ing the old order of things and applauding the 
new. In fact, at that time he was regretting the 
passing of the old — deplored the breaking down 
of standards, the resulting confusion. ‘^How the 
deuce,’’ he said, “is a man to keep his head up in 
this maelstrom ? How can he preserve the in- 
tegrity of his soul in a ‘panic’ world ? Every- 
thing is either nibbling away at it, or else seeking 
to engulf it.” You see, he seldom talked person- 
ally at all — almost altogether about abstract’mat- 
ters. But he had the gift of illuminating sen- 
tences, sentences that illustrated a point, or ex- 
plained an incident, and by means of these you 
eventually pieced together some sort of a portrait. 
In such a way I learned that he had been a sheep- 
herder in Arizona; a cattleman in Montana; a 
settler in Australia; for six lurid months a sailor 
before the mast; that he had an especial feeling 
for trades and, in a secondary sense, for sport — 
190 


Le Panache 


anything, you understand, possessing the magic 
conjunction of hand and mind; that required what 
he called ‘‘Attic directness” — and that at one 
time he had learned the art of blacksmithing. 
As for the mere making of money, he was con- 
temptuous. Any one could make money if they 
were willing to give up everything else to that- 
one end. He had given up ten solid years. Now 
he had all the money he wanted, and had retired. 
Ostensibly he was engaged in a tour of the world 
for the purpose of playing polo wherever polo 
was to be had. 

We paid our bills, and put on our coats and 
top hats, and walked out into the street. We 
were unaware that life, in an unpleasant, simian 
fashion, was at the moment preparing to leap out 
at us. Life seemed to have a habit of treating 
Craig in this way. 

A young man, a woman beside him, was wait- 
ing for his motor under the awning. I had no- 
ticed him sitting directly opposite us in the res- 
taurant. He belonged to an easily recognizable 
type. He was big and bulky and blond-haired; 
his clothes were expensive and his gestures were 
those of a person carefully trained in outward 
things. No doubt he was rich; no doubt he had 
been to some great university; I was willing to 
191 


Le Panache 


wager that he came from New York and drove a 
powerful ‘‘motor” with a two-fisted disregard of 
other people’s rights. In short, he was the sinis- 
ter but not unattractive figure that America — in 
its older communities — is at present producing in 
rather alarming quantities. He leaned upon his 
walking-stick and as Craig passed remarked to 
his companion: 

“There’s the bounder that tried to break things 

up.” 

I don’t think he particularly intended Craig to 
hear; but at the same time I don’t think he par- 
ticularly cared if he did hear. 

The effect upon Craig was interesting. He 
stopped and turned to me. “Do you think,” he 
asked in a slow, precise voice, “that they are talk- 
ing about me?” There was an odd underlying 
amusement in his voice. I experienced the rest- 
less alertness that impending danger gives one. 
Back of us I heard a slight rustling movement. 
Craig faced about and took off his hat and went 
up to the couple. 

He addressed the young man very politely. 
“You are quite right,” he said, “in objecting to 
what I did, but you are quite wrong in the tone 
and words you used just now. They showed that 
you think the world is divided into two classes — 
192 


Le Panache 

the people you like and bounders; and that’s a 
filthy philosophy. Besides, you must never be 
rude to any one. For instance, I consider you 
the most objectionable product of a fairly objec- 
tionable age, but up to the moment IVe been too 
polite to tell you so.” He paused and regarded 
the young man’s excellently fitting white waist- 
coat. Suddenly his pointed finger shot out and 
buried itself in the slightly too convex waist-line. 
It was the most insulting gesture I have ever 
seen. “You rotten pup!” he hissed. “You 
haven’t even the decency to keep your fat down !” 
And, with amazing quickness, he leaped back out 
of range as the young man struck. 

“Don’t!” he commanded. “Don’t! Wait a 
minute ! We’ll get arrested ! Come around the 
corner !” He turned to the woman. “Madam,” 
he said, “would you prefer to have my friend 
wait here with you, or will you accompany us f 
No — ” as she made a movement to interfere. 
“Don’t do that ! If you do we’ll fight just where 
we are, and then we’ll all go to jail.” 

The woman shrank back. I was beginning to 
realize that Craig had the impressiveness and the 
suggestion of menace that exact obedience. 

It was a curious little affair the moonlight and 
a deserted street leading off the rue Royale wit- 
193 


Le Panache 


nessed. About it was a hint of rapiers and flut- 
tering cloaks, despite the grim directness of mod- 
ern combat. “We won’t take off anything but 
our overcoats,” said Craig; “we may have to 
run for it.” He handed me his; then whirled and 
struck. The change of mood was astonishing. 
There were no preliminaries, none of the careful 
courtesy of the preceding conversation and walk; 
instead, a metamorphosis into something as ter- 
rific, as hurtling, as the charge of a wildcat. 
Craig, I saw at once, was a trained man, but a 
trained man with all the untrained bully’s over- 
powering bewilderingness of movement. Here 
was no gentlemanly intent. You perceived a 
background of mining-camps and border saloons. 

For a minute or so there was nothing to be 
heard in the silent street but the shuffling and the 
quick breathing of the fighting men. In the 
shadows of a doorway the woman cowered with 
her hands over her eyes. Then, suddenly, I saw 
Craig do an unbelievable thing; with agonizing 
force he brought his knee up into his opponent’s 
solar plexus. The young man raised a white, in- 
credulous, staring face, before he slowly sank to 
the ground and rolled over on his back, gasping 
for breath. Craig examined him briskly. “He’s 
all right,” he said. He put on his overcoat and 
194 



Craig examined him briskly. 


“He’s all right,” he said. 



1 




Le Panache 


calmly adjusted his collar. '‘Madam/’ he said 
to the woman, "ril send a cab here.” He sur- 
mised astonished distaste on my part. "Yes,” 
he admitted, "it’s disgusting — the whole thing. 
I know that.” As we walked off in the direction 
we had come, he vouchsafed a partial explana- 
tion. "I used to try to fight rottenness squarely,” 
he said; "but now I finish it off and get rid of it 
as soon as possible.” 

We drove in an open carriage to my hotel. I 
was still excited and distressed, but Craig was en- 
tirely gay and discursive and unperturbed. I 
remember the full moon over the trees, and the 
scent of chestnut blossoms, and the smell of wet 
asphalt, and the clock-clock of our horse’s feet. 
We said good-by to each other. A sudden in- 
explicable intimacy held us silent for a moment. 
I watched Craig clamber back into the carriage 
and drive off. There was with me an impression 
that this polished, subtle, abruptly savage and 
ruthless young man was on a quest that would 
not end with the playing of polo. There was an 
underlying suggestion of a crusade. The cab- 
man’s whip might have been a spear. 

From Spain after a while came a post-card with 
a picture on it of the Royal Palace in Madrid. 
"Playing polo,” it read. "Rotten polo.” Sub- 
195 


Le Panache 


sequently, following an interval of twelve months, 
was a letter from Japan. Craig was immensely 
impressed by the theory of personal dignity held 
by the Japanese, the dignity with which each 
man, no matter what his position, holds himself 
and is permitted to hold himself by his neighbors. 
He saw in it a possible relief for the ‘^engulfing 
black muck of democratic selfishness.’’ 

Then I heard no more of him for two years. 
On an afternoon in June I ran into Kneass in a 
New York club. 

Kneass is a professor of biology and, behind 
extremely near-sighted goggles, one of the most 
amusing men I know. We dined together on the 
roof-garden. By the way, I came across a 
friend of yours the other night,” said Kneass. 
He tried to peer at me over his spectacles. ‘‘His 
name was Hugh Craig. He was one of the most 
charming fellows I’ve ever met and — he was very 
drunk.” 

I expressed interest and regret. 

“You needn’t do that,” resumed Kneass. “It 
wasn’t unpleasant drunkenness. He’d just landed 
from a three years’ trip around the world. Al- 
most anybody, you know — ” And he thereupon 
unfolded to me an odd tale, a story the percep- 
tion of which would have been possible only to 
196 


Le Panache 


the mind of a man interested in the hidden drama 
of human motives. 

‘‘You see,” he explained reflectively, “it was 
the queerest thing I have ever witnessed. As a 
rule, intoxication falls into one of three classes — 
stupidity, carelessness, or viciousness; but I don’t 
think I ever before saw a man challenge it delib- 
erately — ^without a trace of insolence or bravado, 
either — and fight it out as one would fight any 
other kind of fight. Throw down the glove to 
poison, as it were.” His near-sighted spectacles 
became misty, as the spectacles of near-sighted 
people are likely to become when they are very 
much moved. “Of course,” he resumed, “I don’t 
know whether in the beginning his action was 
intentional or not — perhaps he found that with- 
out realizing it he had taken more than he in- 
tended, but from that point on the issue was 
clear — to me at least; as far as the others were 
concerned, I don’t think they suspected Craig of 
bring drunk at all — he was just as amusing, you 
see, just as alert and charming as ever; but he 
was engaged in a mortal struggle. I divined the 
agony of it — the coiled resistance of a mind that 
refuses to allow itself to be subjugated by any- 
thing. An illuminating side-light on the whole 
situation was that obviously he was refusing the 
197 


Le Panache 


easiest recourse toward regaining sobriety. ^ He 
didn’t want to take any undue advantage of his 
adversary, if you understand what I mean. He 
was giving alcohol a more than fair field, and then 
seeing whether or not he couldn’t beat it on its 
own ground. He not only drank placidly all that 
was offered to him, but he purchased more him- 
self. Thanks, I will have a light.” 

Kneass sat back in his chair and puffed at his 
cigar. ‘Tt was rather monstrous,” he said, slowly 
exhaling; ‘^rather frightening. A stark struggle 
of will usually is. One had the impression of a 
man fighting with every atom of muscle he pos- 
sessed against the enveloping folds of a great ser- 
pent. I hope this friend of yours doesn’t do 
such things often. If he does he’ll kill himself.” 

I remarked that I had seen Craig only once in 
my life, but that I did not think he was given to 
many such unequal contests. 

‘T’m not sure,” hesitated Kneass. “He rather 
impresses me as a man given to unequal contests. 
There is some underlying motive at work there. 
But I don’t think his contests are with drink as a 
rule. He isn’t a drinking man. You can tell by 
his eyes. And the most curious thing — the most 
curious thing of all — ^was — I’m on the house com- 
mittee here, you know — that the next day Craig 
198 


Le Panache 


sent in his resignation. Why ? He wasn’t in the 
least objectionably drunk.” 

I rather expected, after this, the note which I 
got from Craig a few days later asking me to visit 
him at Scarboro — Scarboro was the name of his 
family place. I am glad I went. I attained, at 
all events, a dim idea of what he was after. 

We had been riding, I remember, apd were sit- 
ting on a fence near the stables watching the dusk 
come up over the distant purple hills, and I had 
confessed to a curiosity concerning this resigna- 
tion from the Powhatan Club. For a moment 
Craig reflected before answering me. “Oh, that,” 
he said carelessly, “that was merely self-inflicted 
punishment.” 

“But Kneass said you conquered in the end,” I 
suggested. 

He looked at me with awakened interest. 

“Kneass is a damned clever chap, isn’t he?” 
he observed. “No, I didn’t conquer; not really. 
I’m afraid you can’t conquer against poison.” 
He suddenly got down from the fence and began 
to walk up and down, his hands in his pockets, 
his head bent in thought. “I’m not against 
wine,” he said; “I’m not against any mellowing 
influence in a world that is daily growing starker 
and grimmer. But wine is like everything else; 

199 


Le Panache 


you can’t let It get the better of you, can you ? 
Everything is trying to do that, the rest of hu- 
manity included. The whole of the universe try- 
ing to crush one back into its own formless shape ! 
We are modelled out of nothing, and then noth- 
ing seems to delight to wear away back to noth- 
ing the exquisite, subtle, individual thing that is 
each man’s and woman’s soul.” He stopped in 
front of me and raised his head. The light of 
the setting sun touched his hair and face until 
there seemed about them the misty outline of a 
casque. 

‘‘Do you remember,” he asked, “where, at the 
end of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac,’ Cyrano says, when 
he dies he hopes to sweep the floor of heaven with 
the plumes of his hat — his plume — his panache ? 
Well, that is all I can make out of life, and per- 
haps after all it is the answer. We haven’t any 
rules any longer: we must face each contingency 
by rules of our own inventing, framed as the con- 
tingency arises; but maybe out of it will come 
a greater thing — an instinctive. Instantaneous 
knowledge that each man will have when his 
plume — his panache — is in danger; when there’s a 
chance of soiling it so that he never will be able 
to sweep with it the floor of heaven.” He paused 
as if a little ashamed of himself and laughed. 

200 


Le Panache 


“Come into the house, now,” he said, “and I’ll 
mix you a cocktail.” 

Those were pleasant weeks at Scarboro — spa- 
cious, ductile, fast-going. The earth was ripen- 
ing to its harvest. Only the roaring foundries — 
and they were far from the house in which we 
lived — disturbed the tranquil mood. . . . 

It was almost inevitable, wasn’t it, that the 
next time I should see Craig, March of the fol- 
lowing winter, he should be in love ? The unat- 
tached man is subject to love about once every 
decade, and he is peculiarly susceptible when he 
begins to question the intrinsic value of most 
human action. It is as if, reaching down through 
the on-the-surface things, generally accepted as 
important, he is endeavoring to find the thing 
fundamentally important. I came on Craig on 
the beach at Santa Barbara. I hadn’t known he 
was there. He was talking to a young woman of 
exceptional beauty. I think she resented my in- 
trusion — one felt a suggestion of irritation under 
the overcordiality of the present generation of 
young women. But my surprise and pleasure at 
finding Craig were too great to permit me to con- 
sider in the least her emotions. I sat down. 

She was a lovely person to look at; there was a 
hint of the South about her dark hair and dark, 

2GI 


Le Panache 


quick eyes and the rose-softness of her cheeks. 
She suited eminently the tawny warmth of the 
country she was in. As a matter of fact, she 
came from New York, was entirely wealthy, and 
was engrossed — barring an interest in Craig the 
depth of which I never could altogether fathom 
— in what she called ‘‘pah-ties.” Craig evidently 
found on her lips the clipped syllables adorable; 
he also apparently found overwhelmingly inter- 
esting a vivid, exaggerated discussion of dull 
people and their duller actions in various quar- 
ters of the world. I dug him out of this and asked 
him what he had been doing. It was odd to see 
his mood drop from him like shabby clothes from 
the body of a strong swimmer. 

He had been in France driving an ambulance 
— of course, he would have been sooner or later. 
He regretted that he was too old to enlist for 
active service, and now he was back and was 
going to settle down in charge of the foundries at 
Scarboro. I hadn’t heard, had I ? No, of course 
not. His father and mother were dead, you see, 
and his older brother had gone to Pittsburgh, 
where the firm now had its principal plants. This 
assumption of business responsibility surprised 
me. I don’t think Craig was altogether joyous. 
“Well, what was a man to do ?” he asked. 


202 


Le Panache 


“I think it’s splendid!’’ announced the girl. 
‘‘I think it’s perfectly splendid!” I cut her 
short; I feared the inevitable exhortation on ca- 
reers” that I knew would follow. 

Craig suggested that a man’s work did not nec- 
essarily affect what he thought. His lovely com- 
panion conjectured that too much thought was 
a bad thing anyhow; it usually made people 
‘‘dippy.” “Life was action.” 

“Life is action!” Good Lord! And in rela- 
tion to the word “dippy,” I suddenly found my- 
self discovering about the girl who had so blithely 
used it a curious underlying agitation, a discon- 
nectedness that showed a leakage in the direction 
of the prevalent disease of uncontrolled nerves. 
It is a sinister discovery; it is a very common one. 

And the two statements quoted were the only 
ones containing a germ of abstract thought that 
I heard Miss Hamilton — Mary Hamilton was her 
name — utter in the three weeks during which I 
saw her more or less constantly. For I did see 
her constantly. Craig was exceptionally gener- 
ous in this respect. I think, without admitting 
it to himself, he was glad of an antidote for the 
constant discussion of personal and not very im- 
portant facts. Miss Hamilton, I am afraid, real- 
ized the cause of Craig’s hospitality and resented 
203 


Le Panache 


it. The three of us went on picnics together, 
alone or with other people; we danced, we motored, 
we rode, we bathed. We talked about a great 
many things with disjointed vivacity. I felt as 
if I was being given a drug not altogether restful 
in its effect. 

Men and women, however, manage to produce 
drama, even when one has as a factor the stubborn 
resistance toward drama exhibited by the average 
American girl. I received the impression that 
Craig was becoming bitterly unhappy, and I think 
he was making Mary Hamilton unhappy as well. 
After all, she probably cared as much for him as 
it was possible for her to care for any one. He 
was very charming, very rich, dimly she must 
have perceived him exceptional and clever. Prob- 
ably she cherished the illusion common to many 
women that, once one of them has a man, once he 
is married to her, she will be able to take — ^well, 
at any rate, the uncomfortable edge off this clev- 
erness. As for Craig, his trouble was that he 
also was cherishing illusions — deluding himself 
with the belief that Mary Hamilton possessed 
hidden possibilities, carried in her heart seeds of 
something beautiful and flowering, when she was, 
of course, merely a very beautiful, hopelessly 
spoiled girl, fed on the paprika of life until she 
204 


Le Panache 


had lost all appreciation of ordinary wholesome 
food. She was, however, yet to taste the sword- 
like desperation of a man of Craig’s temperament. 
Unfortunately, I was to taste it too. Men of 
forty-five do not need adventitious thrills; they’ve 
had plenty of them. The thrill came about 
casually. It had to do with a motor ride upon 
which Craig took the girl he was in love with and 
myself. 

Back of the Pacific coast are hills — mountains 
really — and through them are winding and nar- 
row and beautiful roads. You zigzag up and up 
toward the softest and bluest of skies and below 
you drops away a country of vivid green valleys, 
with patches of green-gray live-oak, looking like 
apple orchards, on their sides. You have an ex- 
traordinary sensation of leaving behind a con- 
crete world and of entering a world in which 
dimensions and time are of no account. Perhaps 
that is what affected Craig. 

We had lunch at an inn forty miles or so back 
from the sea, and started home just at the apex of 
the afternoon and so did not reach the summit of 
the hills until immediately before dusk. At our 
feet the road looped in great spirals. Far off the 
distant town lay upon the smouldering fire of the 
sunset like misty blue smoke, and on a burning 
205 


Le Panache 


ocean the coast islands drifted like smoke broken 
off from the main ascending column. 

Craig was driving his powerful car; in the back 
seat with me was Mary Hamilton. She com- 
mended the scenery, after the fashion of the daily 
ritual of the educated unthinking. After that I 
am not quite sure when I began to realize what 
was happening. 

Speed is a comparative matter and from swift 
motion you thrust into great speed imperceptibly. 
All I knew was that the shadows of the canyons 
began to fly up at us with sudden, sweeping wings 
and that we lurched as we rounded a corner. At 
first, of course, I thought it a temporary careless- 
ness on the part of Craig; but, the corner safely 
navigated, the great Stutz hunched its shoulders, 
as it were, and leaped forward into the dusk. 

In the beginning I was too puzzled to move; 
then, very carefully, I leaned over to the driv- 
ing seat and craned my neck so that I could see 
Craig’s face. He was looking straight ahead of 
him, tense and alert. He was not ill, then; not 
in the least insane. I fell back into my corner, 
choking in its inception an idiotic impulse to drag 
him from his wheel. There was still permitted 
me a moment or so to wonder what it was all 
about. Was Craig trying to commit suicide? 

206 


Le Panache 


Evidently not. There was every opportunity for 
him to do so had he wanted — a momentary in- 
difference, a mere flick of the wheel; but he was 
driving with all the concentrated skill of which a 
very experienced driver was capable. Sometimes 
we hung on two wheels, but we always hung. I 
don’t know when a glimmering of the truth 
dawned on me: this was no deliberate attempt on 
the part of Craig to kill himself — that wouldn’t 
have been like him, anyway — but he was, unless 
I was much mistaken, tossing dice with death — 
giving death, that is, every opportunity and then 
seeing if death could win. The idea was rather 
exhilarating. I looked at Mary Hamilton. Her 
hat had blown off; her dark hair was beginning 
to cascade about her shoulders; her eyes were like 
blazing stars. For the first time since I had 
known her I found myself admiring her — admir- 
ing her and at the same time hating her, which, 
where she was concerned, was also a new emo- 
tion; for she wasn’t frightened — ^wasn’t frightened 
at all, merely enraged, angry clear through. 

After that we were swallowed up — I say we, I 
know that at least I was — in the sudden maniacal 
joy of speed. I lost all knowledge of self, except 
that once, as if I was listening to some one far off, 
I heard myself laughing. Otherwise, it was as if 
207 


Le Panache 


a great giant, with ballooning wings, had swept 
down upon us and was carrying us in locked arms 
— a trifle too tight, perhaps, but that was all — 
through an air of incredible thinness. You felt 
perfectly safe, safer than in the humdrum pur- 
suits of life; you had passed the point where 
safety is a matter for consideration at all. The 
earth was a thing of curves and leaps and tawny 
mist, with, far in front of you, a red sea into 
which you would presently plunge with a pleas- 
ant sense of motion ended. 

And then — as unexpectedly, as improbably, as 
it had begun — ^we slowed down as we reached the 
level road that led toward town. We glided 
through the dusk like any sober motoring party 
returning home to a sober dinner. And up in the 
mountains — no, even on the road just behind us 
— something monstrous and black was drawing in 
its wings, a puzzled look on its huge, blurred 
face. 

When we came to the hedge-surrounded house 
where Miss Hamilton lived she descended with- 
out a word; Craig followed her. They paused 
under a street-lamp that threw a circle of orange 
light. For once the girl had lost the curious, icily 
reserved lack of reserve of modern manners. 
There were a few moments of primitive conversa- 
208 


Le Panache 


tion on her part. Craig heard her out in silence; 
then he said to her an extraordinary thing. I 
wonder if she will ever forget it. He bowed 
toward her. 

‘‘My dear,” he said, “I could die with you 
gladly, but by God I couldn’t live with you.” 

And he took off his cap and got into the car, 
and drove me home with an air of odd, cool non- 
chalance. 

Once upon a time this is where the history of 
Craig would have stopped. The climax of the 
ordinary biography was supposed to end with 
the acceptance or rejection by a woman of a man, 
but recently we have begun to realize that very 
interesting things may happen ,even after crucial 
events such as those, and the most interesting 
thing — to my mind, at least — that happened to 
Craig did not happen until the August of the 
summer that followed. 

I was back in the East and there came a letter 
from him asking me to join him at Scarboro. He 
was there all alone, hard at work on his new task. 
The letter hinted at labor troubles. “You may 
see something interesting,” it suggested with a 
certain grim joyousness; “we are threatened with 
a strike. The old native element is no longer 
here, and my brother, with the usual long-sighted 
209 


Le Panache 


near-sightedness of the average business man, be- 
fore he left encouraged an inroad of delightful 
but temperamental foreigners. ‘Wops,’ I believe 
they are called. Come up. Maybe you’ll see me 
fight ‘wops.’ And the amusing thing is that I 
have spent all of a year trying to make myself 
poor and make them comfortable. They were 
perfectly contented until I came. If they really 
want the mills, they can have them, as far as I 
am concerned; only, the trouble is, I don’t think 
they’d know how to run them if they had them.” 
I went up to Scarboro and found myself indeed in 
the midst of a strike. 

There is a cynical, sullen calm that falls before 
all serious trouble — before a cyclone, before a 
fight of really murderous intent. I arrived at the 
end of that calm. In the streets of the town 
were idle, black-haired men and women standing 
about in groups. The children were evidently 
enjoying a rare interval of entire lack of parental 
supervision. Before the doors of the mills were 
guards with rifles. It was eerie to find the great 
chimneys smokeless and the great buildings silent. 
In the house, a mile beyond the limits of the 
town, Craig was awaiting me. The contrast be- 
tween the coolness of the countryside and the 
coolness of Craig in his white-flannel suit and the 


210 


Le Panache 


dull heat of the place through which I had just 
driven was dramatic. 

‘‘Fm glad you’re here,” he said; ‘"you’ll like 
it.” 

I suggested that possibly I wouldn’t. 

“Oh, yes, you will,” he rejoined blithely; “I 
think in a week, when we begin to bring in strike- 
breakers, there’ll be something really doing. Yoii 
see,” he explained, “there’s no chance of coming 
to terms — Fve given in and given in, and now 
they’re asking the impossible. And — ^well — Fm 
angry. That’s why Fm in such a good humor.” 

I asked him if he wasn’t afraid of being himself 
so entirely unguarded. There seemed a some- 
what sinister parallel between the position of his 
hodse and the town and the position of Paris and 
Versailles. 

“You’re thinking that Fll be another Marie 
Antoinette, are you.?” he laughed. “Well, at all 
events, I won’t offer them cake alone. Fve given 
them cake, and Fve given them bread, and Fve 
given them meat and silver forks to eat it with, 
and now” — he grew sombre — “Fll give them 
nothing but fight.” 

But the “following week” did not come, not 
for me at least; instead intervened a torrid and 
breathless Sunday. Little quivering heat waves 

2II 


Le Panache 


lay across the country; the hills were misty blue; 
in the long avenue leading to the house the lin- 
den-trees seemed to hold back all the air that 
stirred. During the morning distant church-bells 
shivered into broken sound against what seemed 
a thick, incalescent, crystal globe surrounding 
one. 

At four o’clock up the avenue came a queer, 
straggling, ominous group of men. Fifty or sixty 
of them, I suppose; and apparently they had been 
to a picnic, for they were carrying empty baskets. 
No doubt a good deal of the fiery liquid that makes 
Hungarian festivity had been drunken. Craig’s 
butler saw them first and came running back to 
where we were sitting on the terrace of the formal 
garden behind the house. 

‘H’d just go away, Mr. Craig, sir,” he said. 
*^Let me talk to them until we can get some 
guards up from the mills.” 

Craig got up from his chair and stretched, and 
very carefully extinguished his cigarette. His face 
was suddenly extremely weary. 

‘‘Oh, no!” he said. “Certainly not. Go and 
telephone.” 

He watched the butler’s retreating figure. “The 
damn pitiful loyalty of the hired man!” he com- 
mented. “That fellow would die for me, and I 
212 


Le Panache 


pay him eighty dollars a month. Coming ? 
Don’t follow me out onto the porch. It would do 
more harm than good.” 

‘^Why do you go at all ?” I asked. 

He swung around on me and for a moment his 
face blazed with sudden anger. 

“Why not.?” he questioned. “Do you think 
rd run from a bunch of poor, miserable devils like 
these .? Besides, if I talk to them maybe they’ll 
go away. I don’t want them shot. To shoot 
Hungarian working men in a cause like this would 
be just about as ignoble as shooting rabbits. 
While, as for men like you and myself, the one 
thing we do know in a confusing world is that, if 
any one is to be shot, we at least can prove that 
death is neither conquering nor indecent.” Then 
he laughed, his good humor restored. “There 
won’t be any shooting,” he said. “This thing 
has got on my nerves. Come along!” 

I followed him through the coolness of the long 
hall. Beyond I could hear a confused murmur 
of voices. 

Craig threw open the door and stepped onto 
the porch, and for a moment surveyed the faces 
upturned to his. 

“Well, my friends?” he asked. 

A burly, sweating man in shirt-sleeves stepped 
213 



Le Panache 

forward. “Ve vant,” he said, “to talk vit you — 
you yerselves.” 

“You have talked with me/’ said Craig; “your 
leaders, that is.” 

“No, ve!” returned the burly man. Suddenly 
he seemed to lose control of his studied calm; he 
swung his arms; his great face swelled and turned 
purple. 

“You!” he roared. “You! You liP up here 
in your cool house, and ve — my God ! — there iss 
a man here whose childt died last night!” 

Craig threw back his head and made a great 
upward and downward gesture of weariness with 
his arm. “The same old thing!” he complained, 
as if to himself. “The same old thing! The 
utter lack of consequence of the world in general 1 
What have I to do with that? There’s not one 
of them that isn’t living on the money I send 
them secretly.” 

And then the thing happened. I dare say it 
was Craig’s gesture that snapped the cord of 
sanity. I saw a hand raised at the back of the 
crowd and sunlight glittering along the barrel of 
a revolver — a cheap, nickel-plated revolver. There 
was a spurt of flame and Craig caught at his 
breast, hesitated, and fell forward. The crowd 
turned and ran down the avenue. In the dis- 
214 


Le Panache 


tance I saw men hurrying toward us. I lifted 
Craig up. Suddenly he twisted his head from 
side to side as a man will who has reached the ex- 
treme limits of annoyance. 

“How silly of them !” he said. “How damna- 
bly silly ! Oh, well” — his eyes smiled at me — “I 
put it through anyway, didn’t I ?” 


215 



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THE GLORY OF THE WILD 
GREEN EARTH 



THE GLORY OF THE WILD GREEN 
EARTH 

O NE does forget, doesn’t one, in this individ- 
ualistic, egotistical age, the essential fact 
that the plans of the gods, no matter how upset- 
ting they may seem at first, have continuity and 
in the end bring ultimate good ? We are so im- 
patient; we have become so little willing to abide 
the final happening. So it was that in the begin- 
ning I resented bitterly the scurvy trick fate had 
played on Mansfield Carston; so it was that in 
the beginning I resented with not much less bit- 
terness that I should first have become cognizant 
of this trick during my one month of a long-antici- 
pated holiday. Only recently, with increasing 
perspective, has a sense of method back of all this 
occurred to me; a realization that perhaps if I 
had not been on a holiday, had not come straight 
from a lonely country, where one’s senses grow 
keener, the fine shades of the drama I witnessed 
might have been lost upon me. City dwellers 
apprehend things by their width; the dweller in 
lonely places apprehends them by their sharpness. 
Only recently, too, has it begun to dawn upon me 
219 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

that possibly, after all, Mansfield Carston has not 
lost everything; instead, that he may have gained 
much. Already, in actual production, in the 
painting of lovely pictures that will not be for- 
gotten, he had accomplished greatly; whether he 
had accomplished patience, whether he had ac- 
complished that fine inner sense of things without 
which in the end achievement to the person who 
achieves is but a crippled hawk, brooding dissat- 
isfaction, I cannot say. I do not think he had. 
Has he learned by now? And if he has, is his 
personal gain commensurate with the loss to the 
world ? These are difficult questions to answer. 
I shall go back again to the beginning. In the 
beginning . . . 

When a man has been driving cattle in bliz- 
zards, or muffling his mouth against the yellow 
dust of summer days for an uninterrupted period 
of three years, there comes a time, no matter how 
much he may love his little cow-ponies, and gray 
expanses of sage-brush, and all the poignant mo- 
ments of the country in which he lives, when he 
wants gayety, and plenty of it, gayety unshaken 
by the sterner facts of life. I had reached this 
point. For certain things I had been thirsting as 
a man thirsts for dusk in August; streets, for in- 
stance, with a veil of fog giving mystery to a 
220 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

thousand blinking electric signs; crowds, so that 
70U hear the high, whispering accumulation of 
voices, feel the insistent elbows, smell the curi- 
ous, sodden, inspiring smell of slightly damp, not 
very good clothes. And then, from all this, I 
wanted to come back to the unexpected quiet and 
aloofness of a club; to low-voiced, well-scrubbed 
servants; to a bed of cool sheets; to a morning of 
a valet and a porcelain tub and new and beautiful 
clothes. In short, I wanted to touch again for a 
while the thrilling magic of material comforts. 
And, particularly, I didn’t want to think. I had 
been back a week; I was just settling down to a 
full enjoyment of the things I have described; 
life, meanwhile, with its incurable sardonicism, 
was taking not the least account of what I wanted 
or did not want. Out of the warm, tree-scented 
dusk of a May evening the sinister and the un- 
expected strolled in upon me. Its messenger, of 
all people in the world, was Pritchard— Pritchard, 
blond, bland, bred to the now archaic school that 
gentlemen should never show their feelings. 

He — Pritchard — greeted me with the harmless 
condescension he practises; he placed one beauti- 
ful brown, begaitered boot on the foot-rail of the 
bar; in a disinterested voice he admitted a desire 
for a cocktail; in the same disinterested voice he 
221 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

informed me that the Carstons were back in New 
York, Mansfield Carston invalided from the 
trenches in Flanders, where, for the past two 
years, he had been. Fate seems to prefer for the 
conveying of its more tragic messages couriers 
with about them a touch of the futility of a 
Pritchard. For a moment the full significance of 
the information I had just received failed to come 
home to me; I was merely glad at the prospectof 
seeing, contrary to expectation, the Carstons so 
soon; merely greatly relieved that Mansfield Car- 
ston, with that brain of his so sensitive to beauty, 
those eyes with back of them so many pictures 
yet to be painted, was out of the hideous uncer- 
tainties of war. Inspiring as had been his sacri- 
fice in enlisting, it had always seemed to me a 
sacrifice too great. Then, suddenly, a realization 
of the oddity of it all touched me. Although I 
saw them only at rare intervals, the Carstons 
were amongst the very best friends I had in New 
York; were amongst the few people whose move- 
ments I followed from my isolation in Wyoming. 
I had loved them both — and I use the much- 
abused word advisedly — ever since, ten years be- 
fore, they had come, half without knowing why, 
to New York. I had watched them develop, 
from a shy, slim, gracefully awkward young Brit- 
222 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

ish painter of portraits, and a shy, slim, auburn- 
haired young wife, into the winged sort of people 
they now were: the direct, dexterous-minded 
man; the ddicately resilient, mistily beautiful 
woman. These attributes of Alice Carston — this 
quality of delicate resilience, this quality of misty 
beauty — need bearing in mind, for in the eyes of 
most of her friends the latter attribute far out- 
weighed the former. I had never thought so. 
She had always given me the impression of sun- 
set across cornfields — strength, you perceive; 
brooding thought; and I had always been sure 
that it was she who had directed the somewhat 
errant stream of her impatient husband’s nature 
into the broad channel of accomplishment. Wo- 
men are constantly doing this: making little dams 
along leaky banks; pulling out of the way dan- 
gerous driftwood; very alert; persistently anxious; 
and men seldom know it. 

Filaments of all these associated thoughts 
crossed my mind as I stared at Pritchard and the 
filaments grew into a definite perplexity. Why 
hadn’t I known that the Carstons were back.f^ 
Why hadn’t I known that Mansfield Carston was 
wounded ? Why had there been no mention of 
his return in the papers .? Through all the anx- 
iety that was hers, through all the difficulties 
223 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

that surround war-time mails, Alice Carston had, 
during her two years’ stay in England, written me 
at intervals of a month. Her last letter had 
reached me only a couple of weeks before. 

‘‘They’re not searching out their friends,” said 
Pritchard. 

I trust I am not given to premature apprehen- 
sion — a middle-aged man in the cattle business 
shouldn’t be — but at the moment a little, unex- 
pected sense of oppression, of the untoward, blew 
upon me like a cold draft from a hidden crack. I 
do not like oppression, I do not like the untoward; 
I am averse to mystery. I attempted to corner 
Pritchard. It was curious to see embarrassment, 
hesitation, uncertainty struggle for possession of 
his careful, negative face. He pushed aside his 
glass; then he turned to me in sudden decision. 

“I can tell you nothing,” he said; “not a thing. 
I am as perplexed as you. I only know there is 
something hidden and out of the way, something 
beyond my experience. You see, I only saw the 
Carstons for a few minutes the other night, and ” 
— he interrupted himself and stared vaguely at 
the wall opposite — “it happened to be fairly 
dark.” I wondered what this had to do with 
what he was saying and why it was so carefully 
emphasized, but I had no time to question him, 
224 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

for he immediately proceeded; he proceeded, for 
Pritchard, with extreme volubility. I gathered 
that here were injured feelings. After all, he 
asked, he was one of the earliest and best friends 
the Carstons had, wasn’t he ? A little considera- 
tion was due him, wasn’t it ? Yes, just a little 
consideration. Hadn’t he bought the first pic- 
ture Mansfield Carston had ever sold in New 
York? Yes, that girl with the oranges. And 
now, here they were acting in a way he couldn’t 
understand. Not a word to him of their being 
back; not a word. He had come across Alice 
Carston merely by chance in the street, and he 
had noticed right away an odd aloofness in her 
manner, an odd lack of cordiality, when he an- 
nounced, as of course any one would have an- 
nounced under the circumstances, his intention 
of calling at once. 

‘‘But I don’t understand you,” I insisted. 
“I don’t know what you mean. Do you think 
there’s something disgraceful?” I faced about 
on him. “What are you talking about, anyhow ? 
Do you mean to imply that Carston isn’t really 
wounded ?” 

There was a little minute of silence before 
Pritchard answered; when he did, he said an 
astonishing thing. “Yes,” he said, “that’s just 
225 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

it! I don’t know whether he’s wounded or 
not.” 

He allowed me a pause for this announcement 
to sink in. “That’s just it,” he continued; “just 
it! When you see a man sitting in a chair ap- 
parently as well as he’s ever been, when he talks 
quite frankly about everything else in the world 
except what’s the matter with him, but when, at 
the same time, from the moment you enter a room 
until you leave it, you are clearly aware of an at- 
mosphere of reserve — reserve about real things, 
that is — and that on the part of two old friends 
whom you haven’t seen for months, you wonder, 
that’s all. You wonder, and you don’t know.” 

He drew himself up. “I wouldn’t talk this 
way,” he observed, with a return to his old, muf- 
fled manner, “except to you and a few other of 
Mansfield Carston’s friends. No, I wouldn’t talk 
this way at all. I don’t approve of conjecture, 
anyhow — and particularly about Mansfield Car- 
ston.” He ate an olive apprehensively. “I’ve 
never met a man,” he resumed, “so proud and so 
sensitive; have you Never. No, I never met 
a man like him. And, do you know — it’s queer, 
it’s queer, but I’ve always had about him the 
feeling that if you were to say behind his back 
things he didn’t like he’d know about it the next 
226 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

time you saw him.” He looked at me anxiously. 
“Did you ever feel that way .?*” he asked. “He’s 
— he’s the most pervading man I’ve ever met.” 
He wiped his mustache with a handkerchief of 
fine linen. “Going to dine here?” he concluded, 
with evident relief at the change of subject. 

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No.” As 
a matter of fact, it had been my intention to do 
so, but I felt that at the moment I could get 
along very well without further conversation with 
Pritchard. I wanted to think, and, although the 
Pritchards of the world may occasionally start 
one thinking, they seldom aid in the furtherance 
of the task. 

Not far off was a small and fairly quiet hotel. 
I sought its down-stairs restaurant and chose a 
table in a corner. I proceeded to piece together 
what I had heard. It seemed to have no relation 
to fact. It was quite possible to imagine Mans- 
field Carston doing a foolish thing, but well-nigh 
impossible to imagine him doing a shameful one. 
A man who gives up a career, gives up a life it 
has taken him ten years to make, draws back 
from the very threshold of fame, submerges an 
impatient, shining individuality in the great 
anonymity of war, because of the adventitious 
gift of being born an Englishman, begins bravely, 
227 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

quixotically. A high degree of sensitiveness, of 
imagination, is necessary for such an act. And 
the highly imaginative man may be afraid — in 
fact, always is afraid — but he is more afraid of 
fear than of death. And Carston had gone on 
bravely. In Wyoming word had reached me of 
his promotion, of a second promotion, of a men- 
tion in despatches. I remember at the time try- 
ing to visualize him in his new, so strange sur- 
roundings; his thin, freshly colored face, with its 
shy, brown, humorous eyes — eyes that had in 
them that look of perspective instantly grasped 
the eyes of painters are so likely to have; his 
mouth, under its close-cropped black mustache; 
and particularly I saw his hands, those beautiful, 
proficient hands. I imagined them hanging, with 
their slim, strong wrists showing, from the sleeves 
of a tunic too short for him. He was excessively 
long-boned. Somehow, one thought of him most 
as peering out at night above barricades, wonder- 
ing if here, or perhaps there, or perhaps over 
there, beauty was to be found amidst all the hide- 
ous litter of war. He would be sure to find beauty 
somewhere. And I remembered later on going 
into the house and finding there a magazine lately 
come and in it a poem. One stanza seemed pecu- 
liarly apt to the news I had just received. 

228 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

“For two things” [said the poem] “have altered not 
Since ever the world began — 

The glory of the wild green earth 
And the bravery of man.” 

The glory of the wild green earth — and the 
bravery of man ! No, they had not altered — 
either of them. It was extraordinary — all these 
years; it was very heartening as well. It made a 
queer, splendid little shiver run across your shoul- 
ders; a fine, cold feeling touch your jaws. 

Now, as I sat at my table in the restaurant, I 
recalled the poem and the thoughts it had given 
me. No, whatever it was that Carston was con- 
cealing, I felt sure that here was no ordinary 
secret of the wreck of war. The decision to see 
the Carstons — or to attempt to see them — grew in 
me. I have a theory that assistance, sincerely 
offered, no matter how much resented it may be 
at first, is in the end invariably welcome. 

I paid my bill and went out into the street. In 
the main dining-room above the grill where I 
had been, the orchestra was playing a waltz. 
The windows, set with flowers in long boxes, were 
open, and the strains of the music drifted into the 
soft warmth of the spring night. The incredible 
wistfulness of waltzes struck me afresh. They are 
constantly reaching after a gayety their very real 
229 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

beauty prevents them ever from attaining. Life 
wants so much to be gay; and life has always to 
be satisfied instead with beauty, that antithesis 
of gayety. Suddenly I found myself laughing 
with rather dreary amusement at the way my 
holiday, so pleasantly begun, was beginning to 
end. 

And yet the human mind is a confused aflFair. 
At first, when I arrived at the Carstons’, I expe- 
rienced distinct disappointment; felt greatly let 
down; a little bit silly. Everything seemed per- 
fectly natural, perfectly ordinary, exactly what I 
remembered it to have been three years before. 
I don’t know what I had been expecting; one 
never does know exactly what one expects when 
one has a sense of disaster; but to find apparent 
outward peace is disconcerting. That it is usual 
makes no diflTerence. We cannot accustom our- 
selves, despite experience, to the persistent anti- 
climaxes of life. We hear of tragedy, but when 
we hurry to where it is we find, as a rule, exist- 
ence going on much as usual; perhaps a red nose 
or two, that’s all. We expect pomp and banners; 
we very seldom get them. Tragedy is as hidden 
as laughter is obvious. 

The down-town side street, when I had come 
to the grilled-iron gate opening into the Carstons* 
230 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

garden, had been very quiet and dark. An Ital- 
ian man servant, whom I remembered from my 
previous visits, had answered my ring and had 
asked me to wait outside, as the main part of the 
house was stripped for packing. The little gar- 
den, under a thick sky, heavy with stars, lay 
odorous and strangely remote from the encom- 
passing city. There was a smell of grass, of flow- 
ering bushes; a glimmer of white stone benches. 
From a fountain at one end — I remembered it as 
the head of Pan, laughing — a trickle of water 
whispered like a hesitating voice. But in a min- 
ute or two Alice Carston had come down to me 
and had invited me up to the studio, and, al- 
though in the light of the hallway stairs I had 
studied her face, I could see about it nothing ex- 
ceptional. Perhaps she was a trifle graver; per- 
haps she smiled more with her lips and less with 
her eyes. I could not tell; there were a good 
many shadows about. 

‘‘Mannie is not walking much as yet,” she 
said, ‘‘or he would have come down himself to 
welcome you. He will be so glad to see you.” 

How silly of Pritchard ! And how silly of me 
to allow myself to be disturbed by his vague 
imaginings ! As if necessarily a man’s wounds 
would be where anybody could see and diagnose 
231 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

them ! I found myself resenting Pritchard and 
the whole tribe of whispering, conjecturing, “so- 
cial detectives.” I laughed aloud, greatly, I am 
sure, to Alice Carston’s astonishment. “How is 
his wound getting along?” I asked. “Where did 
he get it ? ” 

I blamed my fancy that I imagined that there 
was a perceptible pause before she answered and 
that, as she turned toward me on the landing op- 
posite the studio door, a veiling of her eyes, like 
a sudden wind over calm water, took place. She 
laid her hand on my arm; I thought her fingers 
unnecessarily tense. 

“He — ?” she said. “Oh, yes! He is much 
better, thanks. But don’t mention it to him, 
please. Not a word of it.” We opened the door 
and went in. 

The odd, fascinating, bazaar-like smell of a 
place where men paint pictures met us. The 
room was mostly in shadow. In one corner, by a 
table on which stood a lamp with a crimson shade, 
Carston was sitting in a high-backed chair. His 
face and figure were indistinct. 

“Here’s Walter, Mannie,” said his wife. 

Carston did not get up. “Ah, my dear fel- 
low!” he said. “My dear fellow ! The one per- 
son in New York I really wanted to see ! Come 
232 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

here and shake hands with me. I can’t quite 
come to you — but some day I’ll be able to. Very 
soon, I hope. Alice, tell Emmanuel to bring some 
whiskey and biscuits.” 

I lit a cigarette and took one of Carston’s big, 
enveloping chairs, a chair on the other side of the 
table from where he was sitting, one of the chairs 
with gorgeous, faded brocade covers I so well re- 
membered. I looked about the room with warm 
satisfaction. It was nice to be back; to be back 
here again; to be again with these two dear peo- 
ple. I recalled a night, not so many weeks be- 
fore, when I had snow-shoed from sundown to 
sun-up through the strangling cold of zero weather. 
That had been to westward; and eastward were 
all the scarred battlefields that Carston had so 
recently left. I smiled at Alice Carston as she 
sat down opposite' me and picked up some needle- 
work. She smiled back. 

I cannot tell when first I began to alter my im- 
pression of relief; when first began a return of the 
uneasiness, the anxiety of a short while before. 
Such a state of mind grows upon you impercepti- 
bly; is the result of silences, gestures, indefinable 
mental attitudes. You come from entire uncon- 
sciousness to full-fledged certainty. Perhaps in 
this case it was Alice Carston’s evident desire to 

233 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

avoid talking about the war; perhaps it was Car- 
ston’s vagueness as to his future plans; perhaps it 
was — and here was the only definite thing I could 
lay hold of — the sudden, extraordinary, unlike- 
herself anger with which Alice Carston rebuked 
the servant when he placed the whiskey decanter 
and biscuits on the table near her husband and 
away from me. 

‘‘Never do that!’’ she commanded, a high, 
metallic quality in her voice. “I have told you 
before. Put the tray beside Mr. Harbison!” 

In itself the speech was entirely unimportant 
and natural, but the tone that accompanied it 
was not in the least unimportant and natural 
when it fell on the ears of a person who knew 
Alice Carston and knew her gentleness and her 
definite philosophy of gentleness where inferiors 
were concerned. “One may, possibly, be harsh 
with the powerful,” she had once told me, “but 
with the humble? Oh, no, never! That’s dull- 
ing your own heart.” And now, here she was 
doing this very same detested thing. There were 
only three possible explanations : either her nerves 
were bad, or she was angry, or she was frightened. 
The first, in view of her calmness, her clear, if 
somewhat thin, look of health, seemed prepos- 
terous; the remaining two had back of them 

234 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

certainly no obvious reasons. At all events, what- 
ever the reason, my perplexity and discomfort in- 
creased. I felt myself even growing a little angry, 
as one does under circumstances of the kind where 
people with whom one is intimate are concerned. 
I objected to this sudden closing me out of their 
lives on the part of the Carstons. Friendship is 
too rare a thing for one to allow, without strug- 
gle, the curtain of misunderstanding to cut off 
frankness. And the curtain drops so readily. 
Pritchard had been right, after all. I finished my 
drink and stood up. This first visit should not 
be too long. 

‘‘Good-by,” I said, and held out my hand. 

If you remember, I had been sitting in a chair 
on the other side of the table from Carston. Be- 
tween us was the lamp with the crimson shade, 
and now, in order to reach him, I had to step a 
little to one side. I had expected him to remain 
where he was; I had fixed in my mind by now the 
idea that his wound prevented him from rising; 
but there must have been a temporary forgetful- 
ness on his part, an accession of cordiality that 
for the time being obliterated caution, for he 
sprang to his feet without the slightest trace of 
infirmity and, the next moment, did an unbeliev- 
able thing — put out his hand, that is, and put it 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

Straight through the lamp that separated us. 
The gesture was direct; there was no fumbling, 
no weakness to account for it. 

The lamp tottered and fell. I reached over 
and caught it. The light went out. In the dark- 
ness I heard Alice Carston cross to the electric 
switch, and instantly the room was again illu- 
minated. When I looked around Carston was 
back once more in his chair, but not as he had 
been before, for his chin was sunk forward on his 
breast and — for now I could see it plainly — on his 
face was the look of a man who has just been 
struck a blow he cannot return. Only for a mo- 
ment, however, did he sit this way, for the next 
he raised his head and shook it with an odd, de- 
fiant gesture. He laughed. ‘‘Rotten 1” he said. 
“Can’t be done, can it? Fm still too weak. 
Come and see us soon again, Wally.” Perhaps if 
he hadn’t laughed I would not have known what 
was wrong, but when people laugh their eyes — 
Carston, you understand, was blind. 

During the few minutes that followed I acted 
automatically. I heard my voice, calm, con- 
trolled, but as if belonging to another person, 
bidding the Carstons good-by, and suggesting 
that I come to see them soon again, and I heard 
Carston answering: “Yes, come at night. That’s 

236. 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

better. Fm not painting as yet, y’ see, but Fve 
a lot of letters to attend to, and this packing up 
takes my days. Yes, come at night.” And then 
I found myself out on the landing, the studio door 
closed behind me, and Alice Carston facing me, 
one hand on her breast. 

‘‘So you know!” she whispered. 

“Yes,” I answered. “I know.” 

After that we looked at each other for a while 
without speaking, then her arm dropped wearily 
to her side, where her fingers began to twist be- 
tween them a fold of her skirt. 

“I suppose you understand,” she asked. “If 
you don’t ” 

“Not quite. Perhaps — in a way. It isn’t al- 
together clear.” 

She raised her head and came closer to me, 
and her voice had in it the curious, dry, strained 
note that voices have when they have choked too 
much over tears. “It’s so simple,” she said, “if 
you remember what he is — how proud and un- 
beatable. He’s always looked on life as some 
fine, laughing adventure; something to be sur- 
mounted — and now!” She drew herself up and 
her eyes widened and grew starry. “He’s still 
fighting, you see, but he’s fighting so horribly in 
the dark. And for a while, at least, he must not 

237 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

know that any one is helping him — no, not 
even I.” 

She searched my face. ‘‘He’s never met fate 
before,” she continued, “when it was implacable, 
and he doesn’t know how, you understand — 
doesn’t know how to meet it. He has been so 
used to bending life entirely to his own design. 
If it was anything else but his eyes — but his eyes 
are what made the whole world for him. You 
don’t wonder, do you, that as yet he won’t admit 
it; won’t admit defeat? Some day, of course, 
but now — ” It was as if she was pleading with 
me to understand Carston. 

“No,” I said. “I don’t wonder.” 

I left her standing where she was, her eyes 
thoughtful and fixed on the shadows in front of 
her. 

The little garden, as I passed through it 
again, seemed even more sibilant than before, 
filled with a score of whispering, confused voices. 
Then I went back to my club; my holiday was 
over. 

Friendship is one of the liabilities with which 
we complicate an already over-complicated exist- 
ence. The man who is busy with his affections is 
very busy indeed. Selfish burdens are compara- 
tively easy to bear; it is only when we see a friend 
238 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

encompassed and cannot render him aid that we 
reach that folly of despair where life seems to us 
a stupid matter of an unfair giant striking little 
people into the dust. I reached that point sev- 
eral times during the next two weeks. I walked 
constantly with dissatisfaction as a companion. 
The thought of Carston followed me wherever I 
went, obtruding itself into whatever I did, and 
always I saw him as I had seen him that moment 
after the lamp had been upset, sitting wearily 
back in his chair, a look on his face as if he had 
been struck a blow he could not return. Some- 
times the apparent idiocy of the thing changed 
dull dissatisfaction into rage. Why, with a hun- 
dred million eyes to be put out, should two eyes 
filled with beauty be blinded ? I continued to go 
to the Carstons’ studio frequently, although I 
made my visits short, for I was torn between a 
desire to be of help and the knowledge that, just 
at the moment anyhow, my presence was not al- 
together a source of pleasure. Now that I knew 
Carston’s secret, however, it was not difficult to 
pretend that I didn’t. Our talk limped along like 
a gay and desperate cripple. And then, quite 
suddenly, I realized, what I should have realized 
long before, realized, that is, that my discovery 
on the fateful night in question, far from being a 

239 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

climax, was merely an incident in the drama I 
was witnessing. 

Underneath Alice Carston’s quiet, underneath 
Mansfield Carston’s somewhat feverish cheerful- 
ness, were hidden matters the presence of which 
I was just beginning to perceive. I began to per- 
ceive a grim, unrelenting struggle of wills; I began 
to perceive a vigilance; I began to perceive — how 
does one describe the intangible, the indescribable 
without making it too definite; without making it 
appear as if one had seen it clearly and not, as is 
always the case, dimly .? — an atmosphere of ex- 
pectancy. All very vague, you understand; noth- 
ing I could lay my finger on. Openly the Car- 
stons were going forward placidly with their plans 
for leaving New York; but covertly there was, for 
instance, the curious way Alice Carston watched 
her husband when she thought I was not looking, 
and there was, for instance, the curious feeling you 
had when you entered the studio, as if you had 
interrupted a discussion — a silent discussion, a 
discussion between mind and mind; a discussion 
in which not a word was spoken. There were 
many other curious things as well: for one, the 
manner with which Alice Carston, with clever- 
ness, with sophistry, prevented the conversation 
ever from taking the turn of easy cynicism, of the 
240 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

lively descent to a despairing reductio ad ahsurdum 
that conversation between Carston and myself 
had been in the habit of taking. It had always 
been our delight to prove buoyantly the ultimate 
worthlessness of life, the ultimate folly of man- 
kind, knowing all the while, of course, that neither 
of us thought anything of the kind. And Alice 
Carston had invariably made an excellent third. 
Unlike most women, she appreciated the mental 
exercise of argument for argument’s sake. But 
now she was quite different, oddly different; she 
discouraged any opening along such lines; she was 
immensely practical and to the point and healthily 
matter-of-fact. But perhaps all this would have 
gone unnoticed on my part, or at the most would 
have been assigned by me to the ordinary solici- 
tude under the circumstances, had it not been for 
the incident of the automatic pistol. It was a 
disturbing incident; yet there is not much to tell 
about it. 

The pistol had lain on the centre-table of the 
studio ever since the night of my first visit. I 
had noticed it frequently — a big, blunted thing, 
brutal as modern war. One evening I picked it 
up casually and took out the chamber. The top 
cartridge fell into my hand. I started to replace 
it, when its shape attracted my attention. 

241 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

“Why — ” I began; and then I knew, in the un- 
explainable way in which you do know such 
things, that Alice Carston was staring at me. I 
raised my head. Her hand was extended and as 
I looked she brought her finger up to her lips. 
On her face was a look of terror. “Why,” I con- 
tinued, “this is something I never saw before — 
This gun of yours,” I hurriedly added. “It’s the 
one you used in France, isn’t it?” 

Carston laughed. “Yes,” he said. *‘Ugly, 
isn’t it?” 

“Very ugly,” I agreed. 

I was not surprised when the next morning I 
received a note from Alice Carston. “I must 
thank you,” she said, “for your quickness of 
mind last night. Indeed, I can never thank you 
enough for all you have done — or, rather, for all 
you have been kind enough and wise enough not 
to do; for your consideration in not asking ques- 
tions; for your consideration in waiting, as I have 
had to do, in patience. My very dear friend, I 
wonder if you will ever know how you have helped 
me? Yes, the cartridges were blank, as you per- 
ceived. But I wonder if you also perceive why I 
cannot merely put — somehow I cannot bear to 
give it its name — put ‘the thing’ where it will be 
safe ? I feel now that, wherever possible, expla- 
242 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

nations are due you. You see, I must leave it 
there — leave it where he knows it is. If I hid it 
he would realize my reason for so doing; would 
realize that I am afraid; and he must never realize 
that; never realize it for a moment. But I can’t 
be with him every minute of the day, and so — 
you understand now, don’t you 

Yes, I understood, and, from now on, I, too, 
watched. I fell into the habit of going frequently 
to the Carstons’ instead of for only a few minutes 
in the evening; I fell into the habit of staying 
there a long while. Alice Carston accepted this 
gratefully. To Carston I confessed loneliness and 
boredom and a desire to read. I do not see how 
he imagined that I suspected nothing of his piti- 
ful, so easily detected secret; I do not know what 
he thought must be going on in my mind about 
the hours he spent by the open window, staring 
— apparently staring — down into the by now gay 
verdure of the garden. But men fighting shad- 
ows, men with fixed ideas, overlook the obvious, 
imagine a world as they themselves insist upon 
its being. 

The little garden was catching up with June. 
The flowering bushes had shed their blossoms and 
were taking on the thick greenness of summer. 
Against the wall espaliered roses of red and white 
243 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

were beginning to show. There was a drowsy 
sunshine, in which the fountain trickled pleas- 
antly and a few bees, deceiving themselves as to 
their whereabouts, hummed sleepily. At the 
window, all day long, sat Carston. 

I wondered how long this would last. The 
sense of impending catastrophe sharpened, over- 
laid my entire life, as gradually the portentous 
heat of the last few days was beginning to over- 
lay the sparkling warmth of spring. But I needn’t 
have wondered. The human mind is like a cup; 
it can hold, before it overflows, only so much. 
There is no other question, except whether the 
cup is filled drop by drop or hastily. The cup 
that Carston was holding was filling slowly, as 
the cups of all brave men do. But there came 
an end. It came on a hot and stifling night, a 
night when, if cups are almost full, there is likely 
to be a sudden further pouring into them of 
enough to make the hands that hold them 
tremble. 

I had dined in the coolness of my club — a 
cruelly detached coolness — and afterward the 
heavy, forboding quality of the streets impressed 
me. The city was stirring to its months of fever. 
Perhaps I exaggerate; perhaps I am using retro- 
spection. I don’t know; at all events, I do know 
244 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

that I was even more depressed than usual when 
i came to the Carstons’ garden gate. The Italian 
man servant let me pass without question — lately 
I had fallen into the habit of going up to the 
studio unannounced — and so I came unaccom- 
panied to the door on the third-story landing. It 
was partly open. I don’t know why I did not 
knock; I can claim no prescience here, merely 
carelessness; and at first when I entered the room 
I was sorry I had not knocked, then I was very 
glad. 

There was hardly any light at all; the lamp had 
been turned so low as merely to accentuate the 
shadows. Across from me I made out the wide 
window, a square of purple darkness in the sur- 
rounding black. In front of the window were 
Mansfield Carston and his wife; their figures 
therefore were a trifle clearer to me than other- 
wise they would have been. They had not heard 
me come in; they did not even notice the shaft of 
light that followed me from the hall. They must 
have been very intent upon their own business, 
for this lack of observation did not come because 
of the sound of their own talk; they were not 
talking at all; they were perfectly silent. Some- 
thing made me stop where I was. In the long 
pause that followed, the oppressiveness of the 

245 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

night, the oppressiveness of my thoughts seemed 
to concentrate in the room; the shadows seemed 
to be assuming the ponderosity of material ob- 
jects. Then Mansfield Carston spoke. His voice, 
except for a touch of dryness, a touch of strain 
about it, was perfectly natural; there was even a 
hint of a deprecatory laugh in its smooth accents. 
Perhaps you will not agree with me, but at the 
time the natural voice, the hint of a deprecatory 
laugh, struck me as peculiarly horrible. 

“How extremely silly !” said the voice. “How 
very silly of you !” 

There was no answer and the voice went on in 
the same slightly careless way. “You might have 
got hurt, you know. I might have shot you and 
not myself; and then what would have happened ? 
I would have had worse to add to the damn things 
IVe got already.” 

The voice hesitated, and for an instant the shad- 
ows once more grew heavy; then the voice sent 
them back again where they belonged. “Will you 
tell me,” it asked — and there was a new touch of 
desperation in the words — “why you stopped me ? 
What do you propose that I shall do? Do you 
want me to go on living in the way Tve been 
doing ?” 

Still Alice Carston did not answer. The effect 
246 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

was curious, uncanny, like that of a man talking 
to himself in the darkness. 

“Tell me!’’ insisted Carston. “Do you?” 
He didn’t raise his voice; he was very gentle. 

But the gentleness was too much for Alice Car- 
ston, as I had known it would be. I saw her 
make a sudden movement. 

“Don’t!” she begged. “Don’t! I can’t bear 
it!” 

“I am very sorry,” said her husband, “but 
what am I to do ? If it had been anything else 
but my eyes — Now it’s all gone, you see — all 
the things I lived for. Why, I can’t even get up 
in the morning and look about me. And I have 
tried — tried to get another point of view; but it’s 
no good. Not a bit of good.” He paused again. 
“I’m tired,” he concluded. 

You cannot imagine the queerness of this; of 
this reasonable, calm, incredible discussion. I 
felt a wave of hopelessness overwhelm me. When 
a man talks in this fashion what can one do with 
him ? Alice Carston had for the time being pre- 
vented the irrevocable, but what of the moments 
to follow ? Here was no sudden impulse, no des- 
perate instant, but a slowly achieved determina- 
tion. And then — as suddenly, as swiftly, as be- 
fore, slowly and with stolid oppressiveness, the 
247 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

shadows had advanced upon me, there seemed to 
advance into the room a new presence — a spirit, 
so strong, so intent, that one felt it a bodily shape 
— a figure keen as flame, with white wings folded 
— if one should have to visualize it — and with 
hands gripping, until the flesh bit into the hilt, 
the sword they held. I shrank back still farther 
into the shadows. I had never before, you un- 
derstand, seen a woman or, for that matter, a 
man — ^play, with every atom of strength pos- 
sessed, for the life of some one she or he loved. 

Alice Carston moved toward her husband. 
‘‘Come here,” she said, and her voice trembled. 
“Are your eyes all you have to live for ?” 

He faltered. “Yes,” he said, like a sullen child. 
‘‘And I ?” 

“Well, yes ” 

“No, answer me ! And I .?” 

“Yes, but what good am I to you now ?” 

“What good ? — oh, my dear ! My dear !” 

I heard a sudden tearing of lace, or silk, and I 
saw that by now the two figures by the window 
were indistinguishable. “There !” said Alice Car- 
ston. “See, I have torn my sleeve ! There is my 
arm. Can you touch it? That is my arm!” 
There was a little silence. “Do you know what 
it means, my arm — all of me?” 

243 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

“Yes.” 

“No! No, you don’t know what it means. 
No, you nor any other man. No, you don’t know 
what it means, or you would never think again of 
what I just now stopped you from doing. No, 
you don’t know what it means. Listen 1 It is 
flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood; you have 
taken it into yourself as if you had been my child, 
only more, more, for I have taken you into myself 
as well. And if you die it dies, too, even if it still 
seems to go on living. Yes, all of me — all the 
body you’ve loved and the heart you’ve lain 
against.” 

“Don’t!” said Carston. 

“Don’t ?” She broke into a harsh little laugh. 
“Why not ? Do you think I want you to mur- 
der me 

Suddenly her voice grew caressing. “ Put your 
hand here,” she said, “and here. Do you know 
what you’re doing ? That is I — I ! And you’ve 
made me — ^you’ve made me! Oh, yes, infinitely 
more than even a mother can make her child.” 
She waited a moment. “Do you understand.?” 
she asked. 

“Yes,” said Carston slowly and wonderingly. 

“I am not changed — nor the world. Listen!” 

In the silence the hum of the city, the thrilling 
249 


The Glory of the Wild Green Earth 

nearness of human life that on warm nights pours 
through open windows, surrounded us. 

“Will you kiss me?” said Alice Carston. 

After a while I saw Carston’s figure draw back 
toward the window, and I made out that he was 
leaning upon the sill. In a moment or so he 
spoke. 

“Yes,” he said, “it is foolish, isn’t it? It’s al- 
ways foolish to run away from things. And, after 
all, there’s so much left — yes, why not ?” When 
he spoke again there was a little catch in his voice. 
“I can smell those roses,” he said, “and here I’ve 
been sitting for two weeks and never knew they 
were in bloom.” 

Suddenly he stepped back, reeled, and fell on 
his knees. His voice reached me, muffled, as if 
he had hidden his face in the folds of his wife’s 
skirt. 

“Oh, my dear! My dear!” he said. “Thank 
God I can cry now and not be ashamed !” 

I left as unnoticed as I had come. I shouldn’t 
have been there at all; but I am very glad I was. 


250 



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